Monthly Archives: April 2013

Terrific Titan

Posted on April 12, 2013 by theskyisbeautifultonight

NASA Titan, Saturn’s largest moon (and second largest in the solar system), is a really cool world.  Like Earth, it has a thick atmosphere, making it the only moon in our solar system to have one.  Also, like Earth, Titan’s atmosphere is mostly composed of nitrogen, and has a presence of organic molecules that contain […] Continue reading →

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Spacecraft of the Future

Posted on April 11, 2013 by JT McJunkins

Image Source After the end of the Space Shuttle program, many alternative spacecraft designs have begun to surface. Most of these designs are spaceplanes, much like the Space Shuttle, which means that they can glide through Earth’s atmosphere and… Continue reading →

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New Way to Study Asteroids

Posted on April 11, 2013 by jacksonlangham

NASA and the White House just announced the space agency’s budget for the 2014 fiscal year. Included in that budget is a $100 million dollar project to retrieve and research […] Continue reading →

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The K-Pg Event, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Exterminate the Dinosaurs

Posted on April 10, 2013 by rtjobe

Also known as the K-T Event, its name is derived from the German words for Cretaceous and Paleogene. It has been a long-held belief by scientists that it was an impact by a large comet or asteroid that killed off the dinosaurs. Fossil records indicate that 66 million years ago, almost 75% of life on […] Continue reading →

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The Galilean Moons

Posted on April 10, 2013 by rtjobe

The Galilean moons of Jupiter are in order of distance Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto. They are the four largest and most prominent of the 67 moons orbiting Jupiter, these four moons are some of the largest moons in the solar system–Callisto and Ganymede are even larger than Mercury, while Io and Europa are smaller […] Continue reading →

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Comets and Meteor Showers

Posted on April 10, 2013 by YanruChen

Everybody loves comets. Just think of a flashy ball with a lovely tail crossing the night sky. How beautiful it is! Most people like me have many misconceptions about comets however. The most surprising thing about comets I learned from Astronomy 201 is that meteor showers are actually from comets! How can that be? The […] Continue reading →

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Gushing With Life

Posted on April 10, 2013 by burnspress

The search for extrasolar planets and potential for alien life is one of the hottest topics in modern science. As such, I thought it would be interesting to discuss the place that some scientists say is most likely to alien host life. Enceladus seems to be at the top of everyone’s list for alien host […] Continue reading →

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Gravitational Slingshots

Posted on April 10, 2013 by ibrahim2016

I always wondered why doesn’t the sun slow space probes down when they are leaving the Earth for outer planets. Isn’t there a risk that the probe might change its trajectory and fall into the sun? There is. You see, the more distant the space probe gets from the Sun, the more potential energy it […] Continue reading →

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Stories about Europa

Posted on April 10, 2013 by YanruChen

Among four Galilean moons, my favorite one is Europa. Known as the water world, Europa has huge abundance of liquid water beneath its icy surface. Let’s take a closer look of how this extrapolation of liquid water on Europa. Water is suspected to be the agency that erases Europa’s relatively young surface. The double-ridges on […] Continue reading →

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Transiting Exoplanets: The Search for Terrestrial Worlds

Posted on April 10, 2013 by werdercj

On Monday, NASA announced a new project scheduled to launch in 2017: the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS).  This project was selected after a three-year competition, and will use surveys covering 400 times as much sky as any past missions to discover transiting exoplanets.  This struck me as particularly significant having just studied methods of […] Continue reading →

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