Published in The Patriot Ledger July 25, 2015
I called it “poor little Pluto” in an earlier column, but Pluto was very big in the news last week when NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft flew by it after traveling more than 9 years and more than 3 billion miles through space. It was a tremendous success for the New Horizons team led by Principal Investigator Alan Stern and Mission Operations Manager Alice Bowman, known to the team as MOM. (more…)
The evolution of life
Matt Damon in "The Martian"
Pluto's surface as seen by New Horizons
SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket
Size comprison of the Earth, the moon, and Pluto (lower left)
Aerial view of Spaceship Two crash in Mohave Desert
Close-up of nucleus of comet 67P taken by ESA spacecraft Rosetta
Wernher Von Braun & engines of Saturn V
Steven Swanson (left) and Russian colleagues
Yutu, Chinese rover, on the moon
Comet ISON and its green tail
Archives
International Space Station, where NASA will continue to support the astronauts during the shutdown
Artist's version of Mars One colony (Bryan Versteeg)
Kepler Space Telescope (artist's version)
Pluto - the Former Ninth Planet
Virgin Galactic space plane over New Mexico's Spaceport America
Saturn - Lord of the Rings
Arizona's Meteor Crater
Radar view of the surface of Venus as seen by Magellan orbiter
Use of Terra, a spin-off of CheMin (instrument on Curiosity), in King Tut's tomb
Streambed found on Mars by Curiosity (compared to dry streambed on Earth)
Self-portrait of the rover Curiosity on Mars.
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SPACE SHORTSBig Year for Dwarf PlanetsFebruary 9, 2015
Published in The Patriot Ledger January 24, 2015
2015 will be a big year for dwarf planets. Two spaceships launched by NASA several years ago will soon be giving us our first close look at Ceres and at Pluto, giving us better photos and more scientific data on each of these dwarf planets than we have had before. But what are dwarf planets? When I was a boy, Pluto was one of the nine planets and Ceres was an asteroid. (more…) Poor Little PlutoJuly 9, 2013
Published in The Patriot Ledger April 13, 2013:
My Very Excellent Mother Just Served Us Nine Pizzas. That was never literally true in my case, but when I was young, that mnemonic helped us remember the sequence of the planets – Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto. What do we do now that Pluto is no longer officially a planet? Does my mother just serve us Nachos, or perhaps Nothing? (more…) |
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