pale blue dot
The Moon follows an elliptic orbit around Earth. Naturally, sometimes it gets closer to the Earth than the other times. When it’s also full moon at its closest point to the Earth, it’s called Supermoon. As a result, the moon appears larger and brighter than usual in the sky. The counterpart of a supermoon is …
Continue reading “What is a Supermoon and when is the next one?”
Are we alone in the universe? Or are there any other “living planets” other than Earth? How to tell if a planet harbors life? Until 1992, we even don’t know if there are any other planets around the other stars or not. In 1992, two Swiss astrophysicists, Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz the first “exoplanet” …
In September 2017, Elon Musk, the founder and CEO of SpaceX has revealed a new plan to colonize Moon and Mars with giant reusable spaceships. They are ambitiously planning to send the first humans to Mars as early as 2024 to build the foundations for the first Martian city. But is Mars really the best …
Earth is actually a fragile and isolated rock, a “blue marble” in a vast, cold and hostile space. But only after seeing our planet from space, we did really understand that. Seeing the Earth first time from a distance was a powerful experience that has changed the way we see our planet. Here are the …
Continue reading “10 Most Iconic Photos of Earth from Space”
The billionaire founder of SpaceX, Elon Musk has revealed a new plan to colonize Moon and Mars with giant reusable spaceships. He provided an update on their Mars colonization plan at the International Astronautical Congress (IAC, see notes 1) in Adelaide, Australia this week. Musk plans to send 1 million people to Mars using BFR (see …
Continue reading “Making Life Multiplanetary [Musk reveals a new plan to colonize Mars]”
Launched on October 15, 1997, NASA’s Cassini spacecraft (see notes 1) went into orbit around Saturn on July 1, 2004. Since then, it has taken thousands of photos of Saturn, the second-largest planet in the Solar System, its prominent rings, and moons. And on September 15, 2017, Cassini plunged into Saturn’s atmosphere and disintegrated. Here are …
Continue reading “20 Best Photos of Cassini’s voyage around Saturn”
Sometimes, a wondering star comes and passes so close to our Sun. Now, thanks to data provided by the Gaia spacecraft, we can know the occurrence of these close passing-bys in advance. This potentially dangerous event last happened about 70,000 years ago, a wandering binary stellar system passed through the Solar System‘s Oort cloud (see …
Continue reading “When stars will be passing close to the Sun? Now we know”
On Monday, August 21, an estimated 2 million to 7.4 million Americans traveled to see the first total solar eclipse in 99 years to go coast to coast in the United States, which went from Lincoln Beach, Oregon, to Charleston, South Carolina. But, some of them were unlucky, as the weather was overcast in some places. But, …
Continue reading “Total Solar Eclipse 2017 Images From Space [plus videos]”
On September 1, 2017, a potentially hazardous asteroid named 3122 Florence skimmed past Earth from a mere 4.4 million miles (7 million km) distance. The huge asteroid, which is around 2.7 mile (4.4 km) wide, was the “biggest object passed this close to Earth since the NASA program to detect and track near-Earth asteroids began”, …
Continue reading “Huge Asteroid “3122 Florence” flyby video”
Why do we see only one side of the Moon? You have probably heard references being made to the “dark side” of the Moon – there’s even a Pink Floyd album with that name. But there’s no “dark side” of the moon because our satellite is not illuminated by the Earth, it is illuminated by the Sun. All …
Continue reading “Here’s why we see only one side of the Moon [Tidal locking explained]”
