Farewell Pluto, now demoted to being merely a dwarf planet.
I guess we should think ourselves lucky it’s not red. 🙂
Category Archives: Space
StarDust@Home Launches
Just reading the Planetary Society blog and saw a posting saying that the Stardust@Home project which I’ve written about previously has launched!
Go forth and find cool stuff.
Has Cassini Found Lakes on Titan At Last ?
The Planetary Society is reporting some really interesting news:
Saturn’s moon Titan was once thought to conceal a global ocean of methane and ethane beneath its smoggy atmosphere. However, while the landforms seen by Cassini and Huygens show ample evidence of past modification by the action of flowing liquids, actual bodies of present liquid have proven elusive through more than two years of investigation. Until now. During a July 22, 2006 flyby, Cassini’s RADAR instrument has finally unveiled what appears to be a land of lakes in Titan’s northern polar regions.
Pretty neat stuff, and this image is a neat example of some of the data they’ve got..
Inflatable Spacecraft in Orbit
New Scientist is reporting the successful launch of an inflatable spacecraft called Genesis 1 by Bigelow Aerospace which is a test of technology they’re working on to build various structures in space.
Bigelow themselves now have the first image from the spacecraft, a low-res thumbnail of the vehicle, saying:
We have extracted from early quick look data a low resolution thumbnail image of the Genesis I vehicle which verifies the success of vehicle inflation and solar array deployment. At this point in time, the vehicle is happy and healthy.
More news at their site here.
Space Titbits
Some interesting space stuff just spotted – double vortex spotted at Venusian south pole by Venus Express as well as imagery from Venus Expresses first orbit released by the ESA.
Also Saturn now has nine new moons discovered by a team using the Subaru 8.2-meter telescope. The Planetary Society blog post goes on to say:
If you’re keeping score, Jupiter is stil in the lead with 63 moons, but Saturn is running a close second now with 56. Uranus has 27 known moons and Neptune has 13, but both of those planets almost certainly have a lot more than anyone has spotted yet.
Nice Mars Imagery at Planetary Society
New Source of Comets – the Asteroid Belt ?
Found on the Planetary Society Blog:
So far, it has generally been assumed that all comets originate from the other two known reservoir regions: the Oort cloud and Kuiper belt. The main asteroid belt is home to, well, asteroids, not comets. But Hsieh and Jewitt have proven that there are comets in the main asteroid belt, and that they almost certainly formed there.
Pretty interesting given that the current assumption is that all water on Earth arrived via cometary bombardment early on in the life of the solar system.
You can read more on Henry Hsieh’s website and peruse the abstract of their paper “A Population of Comets in the Main Asteroid Belt” from Science Magazine.
First Images from Venus Express – More Images from MRO Instrument Checkout
The Planetary Society has the latest on the new images from Venus Express and the MRO.
The Venus Express image is pretty amazing, being from the VIRTIS imaging spectrometer it shows a lot more detail of the atmosphere than you can see in visible wavelengths (and they’ve a comparison image to demonstrate).
Venus Express Telemetry is Good!
The last piece of the puzzle is in, the ESA have confirmed that they have telemetry from Venus Express and have held a press conference to announce everything looks A-OK with the spacecraft. Congratulations to all involved!
Emily quotes Don McCoy, Venus Express Project Manager saying:
In fact we have quite a bit margin of fuel on board. We allocate extra fuel for a bad launch, for maneuvers on route, [and everything was nominal] so we probably have enough fuel to do the extended mission, and quite frankly I think we could do another one after that. We have enough fuel for 4 and a half to 6 years.
This could be a really interesting mission..
Venus Express Arrives!
The Planetary Society’s Emily Lakdawalla is reporting from Darmstadt that the European Space Agency’s Venus Express is in orbit!
She does sound one note of caution though, saying:
while the S-band signal has indicated that the spacecraft has shut down its main engine properly, it does not yet indicate the full health of the spacecraft; that will only happen at 11:13 local time, when (if) they detect the X-band signal from the spacecraft’s high-gain antenna.
So congratulations on getting there, and here’s hoping the spacecraft reports it is in good shape!