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Thursday, August 4, 2011
Big News for a Dwarf Planet!
In June, astronomers discovered a fourth moon around Pluto by using the Hubble Space Telescope. This moon is tiny, only 8 to 21 miles in diameter. Pluto’s other three moons are larger. Charon is 648 miles in diameter and Nix and Hydra are each 20 to 70 miles in diameter. Scientists believe that Pluto’s moons were created by a collision long ago between Pluto and another object of a similar size. After the crash, some of the pieces became Pluto’s moons.
Astronomers have not yet given this new moon a permanent name and right now it is referred to as P4 (for Pluto’s fourth moon). Pluto and its other moons are all...
Wednesday, August 3, 2011
Big News for a Dwarf Planet!
In June, astronomers discovered a fourth moon around Pluto by using the Hubble Space Telescope. This moon is tiny, only 8 to 21 miles in diameter. Pluto’s other three moons are larger. Charon is 648 miles in diameter and Nix and Hydra are each 20 to 70 miles in diameter. Scientists believe that Pluto’s moons were created by a collision long ago between Pluto and another object of a similar size. After the crash, some of the pieces became Pluto’s moons.
Astronomers have not yet given this new moon a permanent name and right now it is referred to as P4 (for Pluto’s fourth moon). Pluto and its other moons are all...
Wednesday, August 3, 2011
Big News for a Dwarf Planet!
In June, astronomers discovered a fourth moon around Pluto by using the Hubble Space Telescope. This moon is tiny, only 8 to 21 miles in diameter. Pluto’s other three moons are larger. Charon is 648 miles in diameter and Nix and Hydra are each 20 to 70 miles in diameter. Scientists believe that Pluto’s moons were created by a collision long ago between Pluto and another object of a similar size. After the crash, some of the pieces became Pluto’s moons.
Astronomers have not yet given this new moon a permanent name and right now it is referred to as P4 (for Pluto’s fourth moon). Pluto and its other moons are all...
Sunday, March 20, 2011
Messenger Enters Mercury’s Orbit
On Thursday, March 18th the Messenger unmanned spacecraft entered Mercury’s orbit. The last time a spacecraft sent to Mercury was Mariner 10 in 1974 and at that time Mariner 10 was only able to photograph 75% of Mercury’s surface. Messenger will orbit Mercury for one year and will map the entire surface including color photographs. On April 4th, the science portion of the mission will begin as NASA scientists and engineers will begin getting data to interpret from Mercury’s surface. Over the next few months we should be getting some never before seen images of Mercury. NASA has a website dedicated Messenger webpage with...
Friday, March 4, 2011
Look, it’s the Empire’s Death Star!
Click here to see a photograph of the Empire’s Death Star. No… wait… it’s actually Mimas, a moon of Saturn. Mimas has a large crater named Herschel which makes it look like the Death Star in the Empire Strikes Back.
Mimas was discovered in 1789 by William Herschel. It is the moon closest to Saturn and the eighth moon orbiting Saturn. It is quite small at only 250 miles in diameter (approximately the distance from New York City to the suburbs of Washington DC). The surface of Mimas is dominated by the crater Herschel which was probably created by a large asteroid hitting the moon....
Sunday, February 20, 2011
Jupiter has how many moons?!?
Jupiter has 63 moons! Some are very small and others are larger than Pluto. The four largest moons are called the Galilean moons because they were discovered by Galileo Galilei in the year 1610. Ganymede is the largest moon and it is bigger than Mercury. It is the ninth largest object in our solar system. The other three Galilean moons are Io, Europa, and Callisto and all are larger than Pluto. The 59 smaller moons tend to be less than 160 miles in diameter. Some of these smaller moons have irregular (non-spherical) shapes and astronomers theorize that they have originated from passing asteroids that...
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