Philly Native: Space Getting Closer to Home

So I was doing my random browsing of nasa.org, this morning; like i do every couple fo months or so. So this is a little bit of what I found out about the current exploration of space.

A Closer Look at the Previously Unseen Side 01.28.08

Two weeks ago, on January 14, 2008, MESSENGER became the first spacecraft to see the side of Mercury shown in this image. The first image transmitted back to Earth following the flyby of Mercury, and then released to the web within hours, shows the historic first look at the previously unseen side. This image, taken by the Wide Angle Camera (WAC) of the Mercury Dual Imaging System (MDIS), shows a closer view of much of that territory.

Just above and to the left of center of this image is a small crater with a pronounced set of bright rays extending across Mercury's surface away from the crater. Bright rays are commonly made in a crater-forming explosion when an asteroid strikes the surface of an airless body like the Moon or Mercury. But rays fade with time as tiny meteoroids and particles from the solar wind strike the surface and darken the rays. The prominence of these rays implies that the small crater at the center of the ray pattern formed comparatively recently.

This image is one in a planned set of 99. Nine different views of Mercury were snapped in this set to create a mosaic pattern with images in 3 rows and 3 columns. The WAC is equipped with 11 narrow-band color filters, and each of the 9 different views was acquired through all 11 filters. This image was taken in filter 7, which is sensitive to light near the red end of the visible spectrum (750 nm), and shows features as small as about 6 kilometers (4 miles) in size. The MESSENGER team is studying this previously unseen side of Mercury in detail to map and identify new geologic features and to construct the planet��s geological history. Mission Elapsed Time (MET) of image: 108827618

That was pretty neat, the network news is refering to this photo as the "spider".

Next...I have been following this Cassaini-Huygens Project since before the launch in 1997.

New Update

The Cassini spacecraft successfully flew by Titan on Jan. 5. Its visual and infrared mapping spectrometer mapped the Huygens probe's landing site, now in direct sunlight. The flyby featured two separate stellar occultations to study the structure of Titan's atmosphere. The spectrometer watched the star Alpha Bootes, and the ultraviolet imaging spectrograph pointed toward Alpha Lyra.

A rainbow in Saturns rings. Reflection of the Cassini Probe.

Next... New Horizons

NASA's Pluto Mission Launched Toward New Horizons

The first mission to distant planet Pluto is under way after the successful launch today of NASA's New Horizons spacecraft from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Fla.

"Today, NASA began an unprecedented journey of exploration to the ninth planet in the solar system," says Dr. Colleen Hartman, Deputy Associate Administrator for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. "Right now, what we know about Pluto could be written on the back of a postage stamp. After this mission, we'll be able to fill textbooks with new information."

The 1,054-pound, piano-sized spacecraft is the fastest ever launched, speeding away from Earth at approximately 36,000 miles per hour, on a trajectory that will take it more than 3 billion miles toward its primary science target. New Horizons will zip past Jupiter for a gravity assist and science studies in February 2007, and conduct the first close-up, in-depth study of Pluto and its moons in summer 2015. As part of a potential extended mission, the spacecraft would then examine one or more additional objects in the Kuiper Belt, the region of ancient, icy, rocky bodies (including Pluto) far beyond Neptune's orbit.

So far...

The voyage of NASA's Pluto-bound New Horizons spacecraft through the Jupiter system earlier this year provided a bird's-eye view of a dynamic planet that has changed since the last close-up looks by NASA spacecraft.