Our night sky appears to us like an overarching dome sprinkled with bright points of light. Some of those points of light appear to be very close to each other, and indeed the ancients envisioned the stars as all being…
Category: Solar System
Mars Is Hard
Every 26 months, when Mars and Earth align themselves properly, a launch window opens to allow an efficient path to the red planet. Three spacecraft are currently on their way to arrive in February of next year. One of these…
BACK TO THE RED PLANET
There have been 18 attempts to land a spacecraft on Mars. Ten have succeeded. Nine of those ten have been NASA missions. The Soviet Union achieved the first landing, but communications were lost for good after only 15 seconds. Every…
Hawaii or Antarctica?
nealsumerlin
Posted in human spaceflight, Mars, Planets, Solar System, Spacecraft, The Moon
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Fifty years ago, nine missions spread over four years took humans to the moon, either to orbit it, loop around it, or land on its surface. Since the return of Apollo 17 in December 1972, humans have ventured no farther…
Tagged with: Human space exploration
Fear and Terror
Johnathan Swift’s is probably not the first name that comes to mind when you think of astronomy. The author of Gulliver’s Travels is best known for that work, and perhaps for his satirical solution to 18th-century Irish poverty in A…
Drones on Mars!
A few months ago, I posted here about a proposed mission that would fly an eight-rotor copter in the atmosphere of Titan, Saturn’s largest moon. That mission has been given the go-ahead, but the complexities of designing, building, and testing…
Water: Liquid and Otherwise
One of the more surprising revelations from spacecraft discoveries among icy bodies in the outer solar system is the apparent prevalence of liquid oceans beneath a surface layer of ice. These moons and dwarf planets were formed early in the…
A Wonderful Podcast
I have been a member of the Planetary Society for years, an organization co-founded by Louis Friedman, Bruce Murray, and Carl Sagan. It is through this organization that I learned I could send my name (on a CD along with…
Long Distance Calls Home
I’m old enough to remember being completely awed by the low resolution black and white images beamed back to Earth from Mars in 1965. The Mariner 4 spacecraft performed the first successful flyby mission that produced images from deep space.…
The Legacy of Opportunity
The final confirmation of the demise of the Opportunity rover occasioned a remarkable number of tributes to its 14 year mission exploring the Meridiani Plain of Mars—and not a few tears. Mars is a dusty planet, and the solar cells…
Tagged with: Opportunity rover
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