Evidently so, and they do odd things. The erratic behavior of Pluto’s moons is the fault of the dynamically shifting gravitational field created by Pluto and Charon. For many years it was thought that Charon was Pluto’s lone moon, but in the past decade astronomers have discovered four minor moons orbiting what is really a …
Have you heard of EV Nautilus, an exploration vessel run by the Ocean Exploration Trust under the direction of Titanic and Bismarck discoverer Dr. Robert Ballard? An old college acquaintance of mine is on board Nautilus and has been posting updates on Facebook. The ship transited the Panama Canal tonight. Here’s a live video stream …
Back in March I posted a picture of Ceres, a dwarf planet in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. It had bright spots which were puzzling NASA. Well, new pictures have come back from the probe called Dawn, which is now in its first full orbit of Ceres. This picture was taken from 13,600km …
Well, not really. More like “Get away, get away!” SpaceX, the private company designing rockets and capsules to provide passenger and freight service to NASA and presumably anyone else who wants to send stuff into space, is about to test an “Eject” capability for its Dragon capsule. Should there be a failure of the rocket, …
There’s a mystery out there. Ceres is a dwarf planet between Mars and Jupiter, the biggest object in the asteroid belt at 950km in diameter. Two bright spots have appeared in a 92km-wide crater on its surface. The US space agency’s Dawn probe is bearing down on the dwarf planet and on Friday will be …
Hmm. For years the climate change deniers have had pet scientists willing to say that the consensus among fellow practitioners was wrong: the observable changes in climate had nothing to do with anything we humans had done. Never mind that some 95% of scientists agree that we’re the culprits behind sea levels’ rise, ozone layer …
Attention! You parents who think you and a pneumatic blonde who was once a Playboy Playmate of the year are smarter than the medical community which came up with the measles and polio and whooping cough vaccines, please disabuse yourself of that idea. Would you try to rewire your child’s bedroom with no knowledge of …
So is the sky gonna fall, is Texas gonna sink, and are Florida’s Everglades gonna dry up now that Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio each chairs a Senate subcommittee with responsibility for science? Cruz has NASA, atmosphere and science policy in his group, while Rubio has NOAA in his. Probably not, says Roger Pilke, director …
That’s Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, with one of lander Philae’s feet at the lower center. Because it bounced twice after its initial landing, Philae is not in the middle of a nice flat surface, but rather up against a cliff which is shading its solar panels. ESA has managed to rotate it 35 degrees in hopes that …
Is everyone aware that the European Space Agency has a spacecraft orbiting a comet at the moment? And that the day after tomorrow the Agency is going to try