Posted by Davin Flateau on 23 Jun 2005 at 1:17 pm.
Filed under Astronomy.
Apologies for the lack of posts in the past few weeks - I’ve been out of the office. But I’m back, and ready to share wonderful gobs of astronomy goodness dripping with wonder and sticky with awe.
Well, Kansanauts, it’s another week’s worth of astronomy news and breakthroughs, brought to you by:
The Scientific Method: Turning Hypotheses into Theories and Laws since 1637. and…The Sun, providing nine planets and millions of comets and asteroids cheap energy since 4,500,000,000 BC. “The Sun. 386 billion billion megawatts for free. Why choose anything else?”
To Pluto and Beyond! - If you’ve ever been to Exploration Place and picked up one of the planet data sheets we hand out after the “Stars Over Kansas” show, you’ll see an interesting column for each planet: “Visited By”. There, we list how many probes have visited each planet. But one planet comes up with a goose-egg; Pluto has never been visited by a spacecraft. It’s amazing to think that in this day and age, something like a planet in our solar system has never been explored close-up. But now, after a long fight to keep the mission alive politically, the New Horizons craft is getting ready to launch in early 2006. The spacecraft will be the fastest ever launched by mankind. After a gravity assist by Jupiter, the piano-sized probe will be accelerated to Mach 85 and fly by the tiny planet in a matter of hours when it arrives in 2015. Pluto will then be 3.1 billion miles from Earth. If you’re wondering what that is in metric units, that works out to be: way out there.
Lost in Space - You may remember our article about the The Planetary Society’s solar sail spacecraft Cosmos 1 that was due to become the first spacecraft to be powered by a solar sail. It was launched inside a converted ICBM from an underwater Russian submarine on June 21. The craft was never heard from, and was probably destroyed as it reentered the earth’s atmosphere after its rocket failed to get it into earth orbit. What’s next for The Planetary Society?
…we’ll certainly stay in the business, and try more audacious things, like the Solar Sail, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Mars airplanes, or Venus balloons we’ve advocated in the past.
Boom! - The European Space Agency’s Mars Express craft is ready to look for water below the surface of Mars. Over the past several weeks, the craft has carefully deployed two 66-foot and a 23-foot long antenna booms. An initial checkout of the MARSIS experiment (which stands for Mars Advanced Radar for Subsurface and Ionosphere Sounding) was given a thumbs up. Scientists say that it will also probe Mars for even longer acronyms for future missions.
I See Your Kuiper Belt - The Hubble Space Telescope has revealed the dust ring around the star Fomalhaut in fantastic detail. The image hints at an unseen planet, probably about twice the size of Jupiter, that keeps the inner part of that solar system clean of debris. The ring is Fomalhaut’s version of our Kuiper Belt, an outer area of icy bodies that lies beyond the planets.
Stay on Target - The Deep Impact probe, scheduled to plow part of itself into Comet Tempel 1 on the 4th of July, has imaged its target’s nucleus. These pictures of the 9 mile by 3 mile wide chunk of rock and ice will be used to fine tune the aim of the 820 pound impactor that will be released from the comet the day before the scheduled collision. To the relief of scientists everywhere, Bruce Willis will not be involved in the calculations.
Davin Flateau
