The Cassini discovers a new moon within Saturn’s rings. “Tentatively called S/2005 S1, the moon measures four miles across and is about 85,000 miles from the center of Saturn.” (Via Corsairs United.)
Tag: The Solar System
Ice, Ice, Baby.
Alright, stop, collaborate, and listen — Images sent back by the ESA’s Mars Express show the remants of icebergs once floating in a Martian Sea near the equator, and suggest that large ice blocks may well still exist just underneath the dusty surface (increasing both the chances of life on the Red Planet and the prospects for a successful manned mission.) Word to your mother.
Caverns of Mars.
After perusing “methane signatures and other possible signs of biological activity,” two NASA researchers claim there may well be life presently existing in subsurface Martian caves. We’re talking mitochondria, not Morlocks…but still, such a discovery would be exciting stuff, to say the least.
Titan A.E.
Score one for the ESA: The Huygens probe successfully lands on Titan and broadcasts images from the surface for five hours (a.k.a. much longer than expected.) (See, NASA? It’s much easier to pull these types of missions off when you don’t have to convert from standard to metric and back.) And now, for Europa… Update: 2020 Hindsight has done an exemplary job today of covering the details and implications of the landing.
Lord of the Rings.
NASA’s Cassini sends back detailed pics of Saturn’s finest.
Blue Planets, Red Planets.
The two NASA rovers have completed one facet of their mission, and the results are exciting: There was in fact water on Mars. And where there’s water, there’s…sea monkeys?
Ares or Bust.
Via a frequent reader, Explore Mars Now, a website which attempts to visualize red-planet-viable spacecraft using existing technology. Well, it’s already more realistic than Mission to Mars.
Opportunity Knocks.
NASA scores another success on Mars with the flawless landing of the Opportunity. And, in other good news, scientists have determined the Spirit has memory issues, and have upgraded their prognosis from critical to serious.
Back in Business?
The good news: The confused and constantly-rebooting Mars Rover pipes up after a two-day vacation (although apparently it still has major issues.) The better news: The Mars Express confirms the existence of water on the red planet. Houston, we’re still a go.
Moon, Mars, and Beyond.
“I always knew that I would see the first man on the Moon,” once quipped Jerry Pournelle. “I never dreamed
that I would see the last.” Hopefully, we can now prove him wrong. Dubya officially announced his space plan in front of NASA’s DC headquarters today, and the upshot is this: More scientists, less entertainers, a Research Lab in every city, and he’s going to disband all the Spearmen and Pikemen still lying around so he can build the SS Planetary Party Lounge.
Ok, just joking…some of y’all out there might think that was funny. At any rate, the plan is the ISS by 2007, the CEV by 2014, the moon by 2015, and Mars thereafter. Say what you will about election year boondoggles, but I still think creating and funding long-term goals for NASA is a wise investment. (Besides, if you want to cry election-year boondoogle, you don’t need to go any farther than Dubya’s ridiculous $1.5 billion marriage-promotion plan.) NASA still has serious organizational and cultural flaws, sure, but I think it’ll be better able to address them if there’s at least some semblance of a “vision thing” to build on.