The NASA “New Horizons”:http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/newhorizons/main/index.html probe launched successfully today on it’s way to Pluto. (It’s the first probe to visit our distant icy cousin.) My favorite part is that even though it’ll take 10 years to get to Pluto, the probe is flying so fast it’ll zip past Jupiter in only a year.
Category Archives: Space
following the north star…s?
A quickie from HubbleSite: astronomers have determined that Polaris (the North Star) “is actually a triple-star system”:http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/newsdesk/archive/releases/2006/02/ with two of the stars so close together that it takes the full power of Hubble to differentiate them.
it’s a lot like life
From “yesterday’s New Scientist”:http://www.newscientistspace.com/article.ns?id=dn8507:
bq. The first evidence that some of the basic organic building blocks of life can exist in an Earth-like orbit around a young Sun-like star has been provided by NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope.
Nicely done. I can’t wait to go visit some of these places…
falcon 1 launches this friday
SpaceX announced that Falcon 1, the first privately-developed liquid-fueled rocket designed to reach orbit, will launch this Friday. If successful, it will mean a new era of safe, low-cost access to space; Falcon has both the lowest cost ($7 million) and highest reliability rating of any American launch vehicle. Go Falcon!
UPDATE: The November 26 launch was scrubbed due to technical problems. The next launch attempt is scheduled for December 17th.
my three moons
Hubble astronomers have recently “discovered two more moons orbiting Pluto”:http://www.freep.com/news/nw/pluto1e_20051101.htm. Our icy neighbor has recently been criticized for not being too different from the big bunch of planetoids in the Kuiper Belt, so this new discovery might provide a new reason to call Pluto a real planet.