With the days rapidly dwindling until New Horizons makes humanity’s first reconnaissance of Pluto, a stunning new video was released showing the mission’s planetary predecessors.
Paying homage to over 50 years of planetary exploration, the National Space Society’s video shows the groundbreaking missions which opened up the solar system to all of us back here on Earth.
Through the Pioneer, Mariner, and Voyager missions, the worlds of the solar system were no longer mysterious to scientists and astronomers on Earth. The years of the planet’s first reconnaissance and spacecraft are shown in a fitting tribute to New Horizon’s foundations.
Now, 53 years after our initial visits to other worlds, our exploration of the solar system’s major celestial bodies draws to a close. We’ve spent half a century broadening our cosmic horizons; what new horizons will be found at, and beyond, Pluto?
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I’m emotional
The victims of the 1986 Challenger Shuttle explosion likely did not die on initial failure of the rocket, but instead were probably alive and conscious until their fuselage crashed into the ocean some time later. Six astronauts and one civilian schoolteacher died.
The failure was due to malfunctioning O-Rings, a known problem to both NASA and the contractor hired to build the shuttle. Several NASA engineers warned against the launch and were concerned about the integrity of said O-Rings. Several chief engineers, most notably Roger Boisjoly, pleaded for the launch to be rescheduled, but was ignored by the administration.
Photos of Jupiter taken by NASA’s JUNO probe
God I’m so gay for Jupiter
Can we talk about the Valentine’s Day cards NASA made?
Today marks 25 years since NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft saw Earth as “a pale blue dot.”
“Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there - on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.” -Carl Sagan
New Horizons has gleaned some data on the composition of Pluto’s ices: it detected nitrogen, methane, and carbon monoxide ices on the planet’s surface. The images of the planet also suggest that the nitrogen ices are capable of glacial flow across Pluto’s surface.
Pretty awesome stuff!
New images from New Horizons of Pluto and its moons: July 15th, 2015
1. Methane map of Pluto
2. Pluto’s moon Charon
Cathy Olkin is now describing a new image of Charon, the largest of Pluto’s moons, named for the ferryman of Greek mythology who carried the dead across the river Styx.
She says that the team has been describing the dark region near the pole as Mordor, and that the dark area may be a veneer and the brighter regions craters. “Going from the north-east to the south-west is a series of troughs and cliffs,” she says. “It’s amazing ot see this image.”
“The extend about 600 miles across the planet, so this is a huge area and it could be that it’s due to internal processes.”
She says below that region is a region where “it’s relatively smooth,” suggesting “it’s geologically active or resurfacing” in that area.
Near the top – “at about the two o’clock position” she points out a canyon. “That canyon is really quite deep, it’s about four to six miles deep. I find that fascinating.”
“So it’s a small world with deep canyons, troughs, cliffs, small regions that are still quite mysterious to us.”
“There’s so much interesting science in this one small image alone.”
3. Pluto’s moon Hydra
He describes its elongated, “surprisingly large” dimensions and jokes: “Hydra’s not a planet”. It’s primarily composed of water ice, he adds, and some higher resolution images are on their way.
4. Close up of Pluto’s surface:
Another researcher says that the team is named the heart-shaped region on Pluto after the discoverer of the planet, Clyde Tombaugh.“While [the heart] was a good name, we wanted to honor the discoverer,” he says.
They zoom into one part of the yesterday’s photo of Pluto with the first very high resolution image. He says surprisingly that they have not found a single impact crater on this image.
“Probably less than 100 million years old, which is a small fraction” of the age of the solar system, he says. “These mountains we’res seeing are quite spectacular, they might be up to 11,000ft high.”
He says the surface is covered with a lot of nitrogen, ice, methane ice – “you just can’t make mountains out of that stuff, so we’re seeing the bedrock.”
Source: The Guardian
To Boldly Go Where No Man Has Gone Before
Whether and when NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft, humankind’s most distant object, broke through to interstellar space, the space between stars, has been a thorny issue. For the last year, claims have surfaced every few months that Voyager 1 has “left our solar system”.
Voyager 1 is exploring an even more unfamiliar place than our Earth’s sea floors — a place more than 11 billion miles (17 billion kilometers) away from our sun. It has been sending back so much unexpected data that the science team has been grappling with the question of how to explain all the information. None of the handful of models the Voyager team uses as blueprints have accounted for the observations about the transition between our heliosphere and the interstellar medium in detail. The team has known it might take months, or longer, to understand the data fully and draw their conclusions.
Since the 1960s, most scientists have defined our solar system as going out to the Oort Cloud, where the comets that swing by our sun on long timescales originate. That area is where the gravity of other stars begins to dominate that of the sun. It will take about 300 years for Voyager 1 to reach the inner edge of the Oort Cloud and possibly about 30,000 years to fly beyond it. Informally, of course, “solar system” typically means the planetary neighborhood around our sun. Because of this ambiguity, the Voyager team has lately favored talking about interstellar space, which is specifically the space between each star’s realm of plasma influence.
Voyager 1, which is working with a finite power supply, has enough electrical power to keep operating the fields and particles science instruments through at least 2020, which will mark 43 years of continual operation. At that point, mission managers will have to start turning off these instruments one by one to conserve power, with the last one turning off around 2025.
The spacecraft will continue sending engineering data for a few more years after the last science instrument is turned off, but after that it will be sailing on as a silent ambassador. In about 40,000 years, it will be closer to the star AC +79 3888 than our own sun. (AC +79 3888 is traveling toward us faster than we are traveling towards it, so while Alpha Centauri is the next closest star now, it won’t be in 40,000 years.) And for the rest of time, Voyager 1 will continue orbiting around the heart of the Milky Way galaxy, with our sun but a tiny point of light among many.
For more information about Voyager, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/voyager and http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov.
NASA astronaut films lightning from ISS
Astronaut Reid Wiseman posted a Vine from the International Space Station today showing lightning over Houston.
Tornado warnings were issued in the Houston area earlier this afternoon but have since expired.
got me having goosebumps
he. he posted a vine. from space.
Cat in the summer meadow, 1920 - Bruno Liljefors (Swedish, 1860-1939)