Original Post October 7, 2011 Lunar colonization awaits a benefit that exceeds that cost. A recent Picture of the Day article discussed the new GRAIL mission to the Moon. Two satellites will orbit the Moon together, with a range-finding system that will detect gravity variations on the lunar surface….
Original Post October 5, 2011 The Milky Way is connected to the rest of the Universe. According to a recent press release, astronomers have found “…evidence for the cosmic thread that connects us to the vast expanse of the Universe.” By examining the positions of dwarf galaxies and globular…
Original Post September 30, 2011 A new mission to map the gravity field of the Moon. On September 10, 2011 NASA launched the Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) satellites on a mission to the Moon. GRAIL-A and GRAIL-B are nearly identical spacecraft, except that B is designed to follow…
Original Post September 28, 2011 A recent close encounter with Titan uncovered more surface anomalies on the haze-shrouded moon. On October 15, 1997 NASA launched the Cassini-Huygens spacecraft atop a Titan IV-Centaur rocket. The six ton payload was the largest deep space mission ever deployed, requiring a seven year…
Original Post September 21, 2011 Were the myths and legends of ancient peoples entertaining fantasies comparable with Harry Potter stories? Or were they efforts to make sense of the world, comparable to the Big Bang and evolution? Or were they e) none of the above? If they were entertainment,…
Original Post September 20, 2011 The previous Picture of the Day described several of the many myths that refer to a celestial chain of arrows or a celestial ladder. It asked, how is this theme to be explained? A significant pointer is the realisation that stories concerning the arrow-chain form…
Striations in an electrical discharge tube filled with hydrogen. The left portion is 45.7 centimetres long, the right one 44.4 centimetres. The small tube terminates in a point, the large one in a ring. In the image on top, the point is positively charged, producing 62 disc-shaped strata in the…
Original Post September 14, 2011 Dark mode plasma phenomena exist on the Sun. The image at the top of the page is the most detailed ever taken of the Sun’s chromosphere. The smallest features are 130 kilometers in size. Each spicule is about 480 kilometers in diameter, with a length…
Original Post September 9, 2011 The MESSENGER space probe is confirming the Electric Universe theory. MESSENGER entered orbit around Mercury on March 17, 2011 after traveling nearly eight billion kilometers. Since that time, it has sent hundreds of close-up images of the surface, revealing features and topography that assure Mercury’s…
Original Post September 7, 2011 A star becomes a diamond? A recent press release announced the “discovery” of a planet in orbit around a pulsar that is thought to have once been a star, but is now a planetary body composed of something similar to compressed carbon, or diamond. The…
