It seems the space race 2.0 is on the way! While Elon Musk and SpaceX planning to send humans to Mars as early as 2024, the American global aerospace, defense, security,
Category: Space Exploration
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 notes 2), and “making life multiplanetary”. He has highly ambitious plans, like launching and landing at least two uncrewed cargo ships on Mars as early as 2022.
The newly announced BFR is smaller than the one Musk revealed at the same event last year, 106 meters (348 feet) tall and carrying capacity of 150 tonnes compared to the previous design’s 122 meters (400 feet) and 300 tonnes. But, (naturally) it’s way cheaper than the previously announced version, and according to Musk, “lower cost is the biggest update”. And, still, it is more powerful than any of SpaceX’s or NASA’s other planned rockets.
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 the 20 most beautiful photos that the spacecraft has sent back to Earth during its 13-year voyage around the gas giant.
Cassini was destroyed by diving into Saturn’s atmosphere on September 15, 2017. This method of disposal was planned to avoid potential biological contamination of Saturn’s moons, since Titan, Enceladus, and other icy moons of Saturn may harbor oceans and alien life.
External cameras on the International Space Station captured views during its overhead passes of Hurricane Irma. The most intense Atlantic hurricane observed in over a decade, Hurricane Irma was an extremely powerful tropical cyclone, which became a Category 5 hurricane on September 5. It reached peak intensity with 185 mph (295 km/h) winds on September 6.
Its category dropped to 3 as it passed along Cuba, but, while crossing over warm waters between Cuba and the Florida Keys, it became stronger again and rose to Category 4 on September 10. Then dropped back to Category 3 by the time it made a second Florida landfall on Marco Island. Hurricane Irma weakened to a Category 2 hurricane later that day. As of September 12, it is not a hurricane anymore, weakened to a tropical storm, and then a tropical depression six days after its peak intensity (see notes 1).
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, luckily for them (and for us), NASA captured some amazing and beautiful images of the eclipse and published them on their website.
Antarctica is the southernmost continent and a virtually uninhabited, ice-covered landmass. It is actually the largest desert on Earth. Here are some interesting Antarctica facts.
An international team led by the Italian photographer Filippo Blengini created a 365-gigapixel Panorama of Mont Blanc, Europe’s highest mountain, and the gigantic image became the World’s largest photo. The previous record-holder, published in 2013, was a 320-gigapixel shot of London, taken from atop the BT Tower.
The huge image, published on the project’s site In2White, is created by stitching together 70,000 HD photos taken at 3,500 meters (11,483 feet). The shooting took 15 days in late 2014 and the average temperature was -10 °C (14 °F). The post-production took a further two months.
We, humans, are changing our planet drastically that scientists say the world entered a completely new geological era called “Anthropocene“. But, it seems we are not shaping only the surface and the atmosphere of Earth, human activities are changing our near-space environment as well. The change is so big that NASA’s Van Allen probes have detected a human-made barrier surrounding Earth.
We see images and videos from the International Space Station (ISS) where astronauts float in space freely. That’s because they’re in space, so there is no gravitational force of Earth there, right?
Wrong.
The International Space Station is in Low Earth Orbit (see notes 1) with an altitude of between 330 and 435 km (205 and 270 mi). It is so close to the Earth that on a clear day easily visible to the naked eye from the ground as it is the third brightest object in the sky (NASA has actually launched a new interactive map at its Spot the Station website).
At that altitude, the Earth’s gravity is about 90 percent of what it is on the planet’s surface – still pretty strong, right? To reduce the gravity of the Earth by a factor of one million, one needs to be at a distance of 6 million kilometers (around 3,728,227 miles) from the Earth – more than fifteen times the distance between the Earth and the Moon.
A beautiful image published by NASA, taken by the uncrewed Cassini-Huygens spacecraft, shows the Earth between the rings of Saturn. The image was taken on April 12, 2017.