NASA In The 1970s Expected To Process The Space Shuttle After Flights Quickly, Like An Airliner. It Didn’t

NASA Unveils New, Close-Up Image of Ceres’ Bright Spots

http://www.sci-news.com/space/science-ceres-bright-spots-occator-crater-03223.html

abusive parents can buy their children nice things

abusive parents can provide food, shelter and other necessaries

abusive parents can be nice to their children at times

abusive parents can seem like the most loving parents in the world

You don’t know what goes on behind closed doors. 

launched eighteen years ago, the cassini orbiter is set to crash in to saturn next september, ending its mission to collect data, including these true colour images, on saturn and it’s moons and rings. saturn’s main rings, composed mostly of ice, are thought to have formed only a few hundred million years ago, long after the planet, and the solar system itself, were birthed some four and half billion years ago. 

though a hundred and seventy million miles in diameter, the main rings are only half a mile thick, with the brighter bands showing areas of greater density, and the darker, less dense areas swept relatively clear by the gravity of saturns’ moons - clear enough, anyways, for the cassini orbiter to pass through one of the gaps basically unscathed.

there is no consensus on how the rings were created, but a medium sized moon, either shattered by a meteor or pulled apart by the planet’s gravity, would account for the entire mass of the rings. there is, however, more of a consensus that in about fifty million years, saturn’s gravity will have pulled in the rings and swallowed them up. (but at least mars should have a ring by then.) 

saturn has over forty moons, including one found within a ring gap. these photos show the distant rhea and titan - the latter of which is larger than mercury and has its own atmosphere and hydrocarbon lake - and the inner most mimas and enceladus - the latter being notable for its encompassing liquid ocean of water and geothermal activity.  

Space imaging progress..

via reddit

by Draw Bart Draw

The mission objective of the Voyager Interstellar Mission (VIM) is to extend the NASA exploration of the solar system beyond the neighborhood of the outer planets to the outer limits of the Sun’s sphere of influence, and possibly beyond. This extended mission is continuing to characterize the outer solar system environment and search for the heliopause boundary, the outer limits of the Sun’s magnetic field and outward flow of the solar wind.

How to blow your cat’s mind: brush their teeth.

Meteorite Shower Over McCloud Falls, California

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Jupiter and Earth imaged together by NASA’s STEREO/HI-1A / via