Tag: solar system

Wow!

Check out these spectacular images of Saturn and environs just released by the Cassini team.

A manned mission to an asteroid?

It’s being seriously considered. There’s interest in asteroids for a range of reasons…for exploration, for pure science, resource utilization, as well as learning how to mitigate the threat from a sniping space rock that has its crosshairs on Earth. Neither Bruce Willis nor Clint Eastwood, I hasten to add, will be involved in any putative …

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Canada refuses to be part of invasion of Mars

You know, I’m probably more philosophically inclined toward the Conservatives than the Liberals, and I’ve been on board with many of the policy decisions the Stephen Harper government has implemented, and at least willing to give them the benefit of the doubt regarding others, but… Are you people nuts? What are you thinking? I’m with …

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Transit of Mercury: The Movie

I think it’s probably impossible for us to truly understand the size of a star, even an ordinary, not particularly big star like our sun. Check out this page from NASA with images from the recent transit of Mercury across the face of the sun. In particular, take time to download the movie. Watch the …

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Cassini-Huygens

If you’re a kid interested in astronomy, as I was, there are few thrills to compare with your first view of the rings of Saturn. So you can imagine how excited astronomers (and ex-kids like myself) are with the imminent arrival of the International Cassini-Huygens Mission at Saturn. The $3 billion space probe, launched October …

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The Mars land rush

If you’re looking for an unpopulated spot to vacation in this winter, Mars isn’t it. In interplanetary terms, the Mars neighborhood is going to be rather crowded, as spacecraft from Europe and the United States descend on it in a kind of Martian land rush. It’s not a coincidence: the orbital mechanics involved have produced …

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Farewell to Pioneer 10

This week, we bid farewell to a true pioneer: Pioneer 10, the first spacecraft to leave our solar system. NASA last received a signal from Pioneer 10 on January 22. A February attempt failed, and last week NASA announced there would be no more attempts. That final faint signal traveled more than 12 billion kilometers—a …

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Space propulsion

  It’s been more than 40 years since Yuri Gagarin became the first human to orbit the Earth, and, in the process, traveled faster than any human before.  Today, we continue to send humans into orbit…where they travel at pretty much the same speed.  Oh, sure, unmanned spacecraft have traveled much faster, and so did …

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Solar maximum

  Our sun is perturbed. It’s throwing off huge flares and erupting with spots like a teenager. That’s because this year marks the “solar maximum”–and that could mean trouble on Earth. The discovery of sunspots coincided with the invention of the telescope. Galileo was quick to turn his on the sun, focusing the image on …

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Missions to Mars

Thursday, September 23, 1999, wasn’t a good day for NASA. At 5:01 a.m. EDT, the Mars Climate Orbiter, a $125 million (U.S) space probe intended to observe Martian weather for two years, fired its engines to enter orbit around Mars and dove behind the planet. It never reappeared. After several hours of study, NASA announced …

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The solar system

Voyager 1, now in interstellar space, sent back a final present a few years ago: a “family portrait” of the solar system, showing a shrunken sun and several tiny flecks of light–the planets. One of those flecks, a tiny blue dot, is the Earth. The past 20-some years has seen an explosion in planetary knowledge …

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The Saga of NEAR

Monday, a plucky little spacecraft called NEAR, for “Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous,” is going to attempt to make space exploration history. Back in February of 1996, the 805-kilogram spacecraft, a short, stubby cylinder with four solar panels forming a cross shape at one end, was launched to rendezvous and orbit the asteroid Eros, whose orbit …

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