In 1997, we aimed a rocket towards Saturn and sent a 13-foot-wide satellite off on a mission to explore the strange worlds in our own (relative) backyard.
This month, NASA announced plans to extend the Cassini space probe’s Saturn sojourn until 2017—nine years longer than its original end date of 2008. Read all about it at the special report at Boing Boing.
Thanks to friend-of-the-blog TheGothBunny for the link!
The International Space Station gets a room with a view! The London Telegraph has a lovely gallery of images of the installation of – and first view from – the new windowed observation module. I’m sure the astronauts will appreciate being able to look at something aside from the drab industrial interior of that space station!
Moon for Sale is a fantastic documentary by the BBC about the moon and why we’ll go back. There’s fuel in them thar hills.
Today’s Astronomy Picture of the Day is a gorgeous shot of Saturn’s rings, seen edge-on as the Cassini probe dropped across the ring line. Note that this is a real space shot, not animation, not special effects. Looks like it came out of a Kubrick film, doesn’t it?
For years, we’ve assumed a moon base would be likely built on the lunar surface. But scientists are now proposing that a better approach might be to build such structures in a lunar lava tube such as the one found in volcanic Marius Hills. The hole is protected from the moon’s harsh temperatures and meteorite strikes by a thin sheet of lava, so it represents a better environment for human colonization that the unprotected plains of the moon.
I love how consistently the universe shows us how small and insignificant we are. Scientists recently discovered a Super Earth, a rocky, water-covered planet 2.5 times the size of our Earth, orbiting a dimmer star. This is exciting stuff. Look for more and more extraterrestrial planetary discoveries in the next decade. Viva la cosmos grande!
Love this movie that shows the relative sizes of a bunch of stars compared to our planets. There’s some big stuff out there.
Also, check out this report on this massive explosion, a supernova that indicates the most massive star known.
NASA has just put up a lovely shot of the moon in glorious full color, assembled from 18 tiled photos sent back by the Galileo space craft in the mid 1990s. Scientists ran the images through a green filter to bring out some of the moon’s features. Amazing how much variation there is on that puppy!
Some nice images have come in from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft. Lovely shots of Enceladus via the BBC.
Over at Serge Brunier’s gallery website, there is a panoramic view of Earth’s night sky. This improbable 360-degree panoramic image embodies the cosmic landscape in which our small blue planet is immersed.
This landscape unfolds progressively, one season at a time, while our planet follows its course around the Sun. This image was created in the framework of the International Year of Astronomy (IYA 2009), with crucial help from the European Southern Observatory (ESO). I love the clickable/zoomable VR window. Great amounts of detail… think of the untold worlds out there, orbiting any one of countless stars…
