Archive for the ‘Probes’ Category

Hayabusa Space Probe May Contain Asteroid Dust, or Just Normal Dust [Space]

See that? It might be a dust particle from an asteroid! Or it might be a flake of dried skin from a man in the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency factory that built the Hayabusa probe. No one knows yet. More »










Hayabusa – Space – Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency – Asteroid – Technology

NASA Moon Bombing Mission May Have Worked Out After All [Space]

So that anticlimactic moon bombing NASA attempted the other day may have kicked up a little dust after all.

Indeed, Earth and space-based telescopes couldn’t see it at the time, but there was, in fact, a dusty plume that got kicked up by the kamikaze LCROSS probe. Success!

That said, there’s still no word on whether or not water or aliens or cheese were present in the plume. Perhaps it was a combination of all three, and that’s the reason for NASA’s silence thus far (more seriously, NASA says results by “mid-November”).

Next time, just to be sure, I think NASA should shoot something a bit bigger into the Moon for better results. Something like, say, Richard Heene’s ego. [New Scientist]

50 Years of Space Travel In One Beautiful Solar System Map [Space]

Most missions through space are lonely. Solitary probes arc through the solar system, charming us with their photos and data, and eventually—quietly—fade into disrepair, or out of range. But witnessed together, they form something sublime.

National Geographic has combined mankind’s nearly 200 manned and unmanned exploratory space missions into one infographic. It’s not nearly to scale, and it doesn’t even try to follow the actual paths of the various chunks of metal we’ve tossed into the ether.

But the broad strokes are all here, and they’re fascinating: Of the dozens and dozens of probes launched in the last 50 years, precious few have made it past the asteroid belt; a handful have been tossed into the face of the sun; and just the luckiest, boldest pieces of hardware have been jettisoned into the outer reaches of our solar system.

NatGeo’s got an interactive scrollable map here, but honestly, I’d skip straight to the poster-sized version on Flickr. [NatGeo via i09]