JUNO Orbiter Mated to Mightiest Atlas rocket for Aug. 5 Blastoff to Jupiter
Updated: 2011-07-31 03:54:59
In less than one week’s time, NASA’s $1.1 Billion Juno probe will blast off on the most powerful Atlas V rocket ever built and embark on a five year cruise to Jupiter where it will seek to elucidate the mysteries of the birth and evolution of our solar system’s largest planet and how that knowledge [...]
Space Shuttle Atlantis closed out NASA’s Space Shuttle Era with a safe touchdown on July 21, 2011 at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida at the conclusion of the STS-135 mission, the 135th and final shuttle mission. I was extremely fortunate to be an eyewitness to history and one of the lucky few journalists permitted [...]
On the Planetary Society web site: The End of the Space Shuttle Program
Pluto Has Moons
That distant world called Pluto has surprised astronomers again, yielding up yet another moon. Pluto’s largest moon is Charon and was discovered in 1978. Two more — Nix and Hydra — were found in 2005. The new one, called P4 (for now), is quite small, somewhere between 13 to 34 kilometers across, and [...]