Exactly how and when the Saturn’s rings formed is an issue that has fascinated astronomers and planetary scientists for centuries.
The rings are made mostly of particles of water ice that range in size from smaller than a grain of sand to as large as mountains.
The ring system extends up to 175,000 miles (282,000km) from the planet, but for all their immense width, they are razor-thin, about 30 feet (10 meters) thick in most places.
The Lunar Polar Gas-Dynamic Mining Outpost (LGMO) (see quad chart graphic) is a breakthrough mission architecture that promises to greatly reduce the cost of human exploration and industrialization of the Moon. LGMO is based on two new innovations that together solve the problem of affordable lunar polar ice mining for propellant production. The first innovation is based on a new insight into lunar topography: our analysis suggests that there are large (hundreds of meters) landing areas in small (0.5−1.5 km) nearpolar craters on which the surface is permafrost in perpetual darkness but with perpetual sunlight available at altitudes of only 10s to 100s of meters. In these prospective landing sites, deployable solar arrays held vertically on masts 100 m or so in length (lightweight and feasible in lunar gravity) can provide nearly continuous power.
2022: First astronauts.
Not content with just sending astronauts into the cosmos, India is also planning an ambitious project to develop and launch its own space station, the head of its space agency has announced.
Dr Kailasavadivoo Sivan, Chairman of Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), told reporters on Thursday that the effort will be an extension of its Gaganyaan mission, which aims to blast New Delhi’s first ever astronauts into orbit by August 2022.
“We have to sustain the Gaganyaan program after the launch of the human space mission,” Sivan said.
🔥 Absolutely beautiful video created using still images taken by the Cassini spacecraft during its flyby of Jupiter and while at Saturn. Shown is Io and Europa over Jupiter’s Great Red Spot and then Titan as it passes over Saturn and it’s edge-on rings. NASA/JPL-Caltech/SSI/CICLOPS/Kevin M. Gill.
A mysterious large mass of material has been discovered beneath the largest crater in our solar system—the Moon’s South Pole-Aitken basin—and may contain metal from the asteroid that crashed into the Moon and formed the crater, according to a Baylor University study.
“Imagine taking a pile of metal five times larger than the Big Island of Hawaii and burying it underground. That’s roughly how much unexpected mass we detected,” said lead author Peter B. James.
Ph.D., assistant professor of planetary geophysics in Baylor’s College of Arts & Sciences. The crater itself is oval-shaped, as wide as 2,000 kilometers—roughly the distance between Waco, Texas, and Washington, D.C.—and several miles deep. Despite its size, it cannot be seen from Earth because it is on the far side of the Moon.
