NASA – NASA’s Cassini Discovers Potential Liquid Water on Enceladus
The Cassini mission, already a stunning success, seems to have landend another scoop: The possibility that liquid water exists on the Saturn moon Enceladus.
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NASA – Robotic NASA Craft Begins Orbiting Mars for Most-Detailed Exam
The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft has reached the red planet, and is now performing an aerobreaking manoeuvre over the next 6 months.
Another success for the NASA robotic missions.
NASA – NASA’s Pluto Mission Launched Toward New Horizons
The New Horizons Pluto mission launched successfully yesterday.
Quote from the above press release:
“The United States of America has just made history by launching the first spacecraft to explore Pluto and the Kuiper Belt beyond,” says Dr. Alan Stern, New Horizons principal investigator, from Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo. “No other nation has this capability. This is the kind of exploration that forefathers, like Lewis and Clark 200 years ago this year, made a trademark of our nation.”
Congratulations to NASA with the success, they’re batting a 100.
After the spectacular failures of a number of robotic missions in the 90ies, lead NASA to change it’s traditional complicated space craft designs to simpler, innovative (like the use of airbags for soft landings) and last, but not least, cheaper designs, the success-rate of the robotic missions has been increasing, and it now seems like routine that the missions are so successful, that they are extendend again and again.
Wired 13.12: Slacking Off in Science
I was really surprised by this article in WIRED Magazine. For years and years we’ve been told that Denmark is suffering from a “brain drain”, but according to this WIRED Magazine article, based on information from a number of US and international science indicators, for instance the CIA World Factbook; Science and Engineering Indicators, this is not true.
The European Homepage For The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope
I just stumbled upon the official website of the Hubble Space Telescope, spacetelescope.org. spacetelescope.org is a great site, the place to go for all those amazing images, that keeps coming, after Hubble has been in service for 15 years.
ESA – Results from Mars Express and Huygens
The European Space Agency has published results from findings of the Mars Express and Huygens probes.
There are strong hints that liquid water-ice exists deep underground on Mars. Existence of water is a prerequisite for extended stays on Mars, e.g. colonies, where the settlers will have to live off the land.
The Huygens probe, that was hitching a ride with the Cassini Saturn orbiter, discovered that Titan is, in many respects, similar to Earth.
Congratulations to ESA with the success of these missions, and the groundbreaking science that they have provided.
BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Probe ‘gathers asteroid material’
The Japaneese space probe, Hayabusa, has sucessfully gathered material from the asteroid Itokawa.
Congratulations to the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (Jaxa), with the success, after the mission originally seemed to have failed.
BBC NEWS | UK | Magazine | Project Paperclip: Dark side of the Moon
An article describing the so called Project Paperclip, that aimed to secure the brightest of the Nazi German scientists for the US – most of whom were die-hard Nazis.
Without the sacrifice of thousands in the Nazi labour camps where the V2 rockets were produced, we would not have gotten to moon as early as we did.
Food for thought!
BBC NEWS | Health | Doctors urge research on HIV man
This could be the breakthrough we’ve been looking for. I’ve heard earlier reports of some African prostitutes that seemed to be imune. According to the BBC article this is anecdotal.
I just found out that NASA is planning a mission to Pluto – the last planet in the solar system that hasn’t been explored by a robotic mission – at least if you exlude the newly discovered 10th planet.
The mission is to be managed, among others, by the The Applied Physics Laboratory (JHUAPL) at John Hopkins University and The Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), the Caltech institute, that manages most of the US robotic missions to the planets.