When you look at images of planets in our solar system, they all seem to follow a certain design. The rocky ones are round with a few moons, while the gas giants and the ice giants have rings. But one of them is different. It seems to be tilted on its side, with its rings nearly at right angles to its equator. That planet is Uranus.
Tag: Space
Fantastic Women Series – Caroline Herschel First Professional Female Astronomer
Caroline Herschel was the First Professional Female Astronomer who discovered comets and star clusters in the 18th century and the first to be awarded a Gold Medal by the Royal Society.
Take A Trip to Mercury!
Let’s take a trip to the planet Mercury. Use your cursor to check out its surface inside! The European and Japanese spacecraft Bepi Colombi is on its way to orbit the planet in 2025 & took amazing images.
Jocelyn Bell Burnell
The astrophysicist who co-discovered the first radio pulsar in 1967 but – surprise surprise – the Nobel Prize this discovery received in 1974 did not include her name.
Jupiter: Giant of the Solar System
Although it is named after the Roman God of sky and thunder (and king of the gods), ancient civilizations long before the Romans knew of Jupiter. It is one of the brightest objects in the sky and is visible to the naked eye, so it was easy to spot. This blog has amazing images of the God of all the planets.
A History of the Rocket
A brief history of the rocket and the rocket scientists that helped to build it.
Voyagers 1 & 2 – The Spacecraft That Keep on Giving
A blog celebrating Voyagers 1 and 2, two or our longest running and farthest spacecraft, still going strong after 42 years. Voyager 2 recently transmitted new data from interstellar space. We also talk about their connection to Carl Sagan and the Pale Blue Dot.
15 years of the International Space Station: It’s a great time to be alive!
(Published in The Nation)
The ISS is a joint venture between the US, Russia, Japan and EU, and more than 220 people from 17 countries have visited it since the year 2000. Its purpose is to serve as a micro-gravity and space environment research laboratory and where crew members conduct experiments in a number of scientific fields. But the most exciting thing about it is that the ISS was actually assembled in space, making it the largest structure to have been built there – ever!
Hello Pluto! Exploring New Horizons
(Published in The Nation)
On July 14, this coming Tuesday, a human made space craft will visit Pluto, the erstwhile planet, current dwarf planet. This is a world that is 3 billion miles away, in what is known as the Kuiper Belt (a disc of comets and small planets beyond Neptune), the farthest planet humans have ever seen and studied and the first Kuiper Belt object to be visited.