Tag Archives: exploration

Juno Probe Makes Fourth Passage of Jupiter’s Clouds

  Last Monday (March 27), NASA’s Juno spacecraft made a historic passage within the vicinity of the cloud tops of Jupiter’s atmosphere, marking its fifth overall flyby of the gas giant and fourth “science pass”, or experimental run. The probe marked its closest point to the planet at 08:52 GMT, coming within 2700 miles of its […] Continue reading

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The Importance of Spectroscopy in Solar System Exploration

While the very existence of visible light allows for the viewing of celestial bodies, not enough credit is oft given to the true capability of light’s full spectrum. Spectroscopy is an imaging and scientific method of measurement that involves the unique spectra that occur when light comes into contact with an object or substance of […] Continue reading

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Celestial Navigation: The Sea Astrolabe

The sea astrolabe was a brass tool constructed and used for the purpose of determining one’s latitude. Most commonly, it was used on long marine voyages that required knowledge of the ship’s exact whereabouts in order to continue in the correct direction. The astrolabe measures the altitude of the sun at noontime or the meridian… Continue reading Celestial Navigation: The Sea Astrolabe Continue reading

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Bootstrapping Space Industry

In 2012, Philip Metzger and some of his colleagues from the Kennedy Space Center worked on a paper theorizing how we could “bootstrap” our way across the Solar System. The first step of their plan was to get materials to the Moon’s surface. From there, development of the industry would continue as the field of robotics has… Continue reading

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To Infinity and Beyond! (Maybe)

NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope is how we have found many exoplanets and have hoped to find more, however, the universe may have other plans… Continue reading

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Space: The Final Frontier…

These are the voyages of the space probe New Horizons . Its continuing mission: to explore strange dwarf planets, to seek out new objects and new data sets, to boldly go where no probe has gone before… Continue reading

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Space: The Final Frontier…

These are the voyages of the space probe New Horizons . Its continuing mission: to explore strange dwarf planets, to seek out new objects and new data sets, to boldly go where no probe has gone before… Continue reading

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New Horizons

Exploring Pluto Pluto, the small icy body at the edge of our planetary system, has been under scrutiny in scientific …

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The Future of Exploration

Through everything that I have learned in this class, I find myself most interested in the prospects for finding life elsewhere in the galaxy in the future. Given everything that we now know about solar system formation and the galaxy, it does not seem entirely unlikely that we are alone here on Earth. Microbial life […] Continue reading

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The magic of Stellarium

Have you ever accidentally stumbled upon something amazing? Like that burger joint you stumbled into when you were out late on Friday night and found out they served the most amazing cheeseburger? Finding out about Stellarium last semester had something of a similar effect on me. While previously I was left swooning over magnificent pictures […] Continue reading

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