Keep Moving Forward

The Sun.

(via project-argus)

unknownskywalker:

Ring Moons’ Effects

Saturn’s moons Daphnis and Pan work their effects on the planet’s rings in this view from Cassini.

Daphnis, on the left of the image, orbits in the Keeler Gap of the A ring. The moon’s gravitational pull perturbs the orbits of the particles of the A ring forming the gap’s edge and sculpts the edge into waves having both horizontal (radial) and out-of-plane components.

Pan, in the top right of the image, orbits in the Encke Gap of the A ring. The effects of that moon’s gravity can be seen as dark wakes propagating toward the middle of the image.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on June 3, 2010 from a distance of approximately 529,000 kilometers from Saturn.

Cool.

(via cassini-huygens)

avarenity:

crookedindifference:

Voyager Spacecraft Facts

• A total of 11,000 workyears was devoted to the Voyager project through the Neptune encounter. This is equivalent to one-third the amount of effort estimated to complete the great pyramid at Giza to King Cheops.
• A total of five trillion bits of scientific data had been returned to Earth by both Voyager spacecraft at the completion of the Neptune encounter. This represents enough bits to fill more than seven thousand music CDs.
• Each Voyager spacecraft comprises 65,000 individual parts. Many of these parts have a large number of “equivalent” smaller parts such as transistors. One computer memory alone contains over one million equivalent electronic parts, with each spacecraft containing some five million equivalent parts. Since a color TV set contains about 2500 equivalent parts, each Voyager has the equivalent electronic circuit complexity of some 2000 color TV sets.
• Both Voyagers were specifically designed and protected to withstand the large radiation dosage during the Jupiter swing-by. This was accomplished by selecting radiation-hardened parts and by shielding very sensitive parts. An unprotected human passenger riding aboard Voyager 1 during its Jupiter encounter would have received a radiation dose equal to one thousand times the lethal level.
• A set of small thrusters provides Voyager with the capability for attitude control and trajectory correction. Each of these tiny assemblies has a thrust of only three ounces. In the absence of friction, on a level road, it would take nearly six hours to accelerate a large car up to a speed of 48 km/h (30 mph) using one of the thrusters.
• Voyager’s fuel efficiency (in terms of mpg) is quite impressive. Even though most of the launch vehicle’s 700 ton weight is due to rocket fuel, Voyager 2’s great travel distance of 7.1 billion km (4.4 billion mi) from launch to Neptune resulted in a fuel economy of about 13,000 km per liter (30,000 mi per gallon).
• Barring any serious spacecraft subsystem failures, the Voyagers may survive until the early twenty-first century (~ 2025), when diminishing power and hydrazine levels will prevent further operation. Were it not for these dwindling consumables and the possibility of losing lock on the faint Sun, our tracking antennas could continue to “talk” with the Voyagers for another century or two!

always reblog Voyager stuff!

I didn’t know most of this!

universalnomad:

How big the Sun would look if you were on other planets in our solar system.

VERY interesting…

(via spaceandstuffidk)

temporallydisplacedrocketman:

Earth’s Siblings: Inside The Planets

Click each for a neat and informative view of the neighboring planets in our Solar System.

via SPACE

For those who have always wondered or just never known what’s inside our nearest neighbors. Some are very similar, others not so much.

It’s funny, m father called me up and asked me the other day what exactly the moon was made up of, being spewn from the Earth/Impactor and all. I half-heartedly told him that it wasn’t made of cheese after all….

Very useful.

temporallydisplacedrocketman:

itsfullofstars:

As promised, here are the full resolution images of the posters I created for my squadron. Download option is available for each photo.

Enjoy!

https://picasaweb.google.com/JoeyBarone/AstronomySpacePosters

These are really good, I recommend checking them out and sharing them!

Fill your life with Space!

astroperlas:

Marte desde la cámara VMC de la Mars Express (ESA).

El planeta Marte.

(via project-argus)

crookedindifference:

Solar Sails

A form of spacecraft propulsion using the radiation pressure of light from a star or laser to push enormous ultra-thin mirrors to high speeds. Japan’s JAXA successfully tested IKAROS in 2010. The goal was to deploy and control the sail and for the first time determining the minute orbit perturbations caused by light pressure. Orbit determination was done by the nearby AKATSUKI probe from which IKAROS detached after both had been brought into a transfer orbit to Venus.

Solar sails!

(via project-argus)

avarielle:

instead of sleeping like a normal person, I was randomly lurking on the Cassini mission page when I saw this artwork. Can’t find a higher resolution image so you get tiny image.

Image click through goes to the fly-by page.

Very Star-Wars-force-ghost.

(via avarenity)

avarielle:

searchingforadventure:

Saturn

No computer editing has been done to this photo. Saturn is eclipsing the sun from the camera probe’s view. That little spot off to the upper leftside of her brightest rings… Well, that’s us. That’s Earth.

View Larger.

ALWAYS REBLOG.

of course! I reblog anything to do with the Cassini mission.

This is one of the most amazing photographs ever taken.

(via avarenity)