Mars has surface water, but not enough. Ceres, the largest asteroid, might be 25% water. If we simply crashed Ceres into Mars, that could cover 33% of Mars with oceans up to 5900 meters deep. (Spherical projection by request.)
‘if we simply crashed Ceres into Mars”
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T E R R A F O R M I N G
space
nasa:
LIFTOFF!
On July 7, three crew members launched from Earth; headed to their new home on the International Space Station.
Crewmembers Kate Rubins of NASA, Anatoly Ivanishin of Roscosmos and Takuya Onishi of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) will spend approximately four months on the orbital complex, returning to Earth in October.
Photo Credit: (NASA/Bill Ingalls)
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First, I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to earth.
Special Message by the President on Urgent National Needs May 25, 1961.
File Unit: John F. Kennedy President’s Office Files; Speech Files; Special Message to Congress on Urgent National Needs, 5/23/1961 – 5/25/1961. Series: Papers of President Kennedy: President’s Office Files: Speech File, 1961 – 1963. Collection: Papers of John F. Kennedy: President’s Office Files, 1/20/1961 – 11/22/1963
President John F. Kennedy first announced the goal of landing an American on Moon during a special address to Congress on May 25, 1961. Eight years later on July 20, 1969, @nasa‘s Apollo 11 mission would achieve this goal.
- Watch an excerpt of President Kennedy’s speech via the @jfklibrary:
Excerpt from an Address Before a Joint Session of Congress, 25 May 1961 - Selected pages from JFK’s Special Address:
Special Message by the President on Urgent National Needs May 25, 1961 (page 1)
Special Message by the President on Urgent National Needs May 25, 1961 (page 8)
Special Message by the President on Urgent National Needs May 25, 1961 (page 9)
See all the pages of JFK’s Special Message in the National Archives Catalog
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(via todaysdocument)
NASA just saw something come out of a black hole for the first time ever.
You don’t have to know a whole lot about science to know that black holes typically suck things in, not spew things out. But NASA just spotted something mighty strange at the supermassive black hole Markarian 335.
Two of NASA’s space telescopes, including the Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR), miraculously observed a black hole’s corona “launched” away from the supermassive black hole. Then a massive pulse of X-ray energy spewed out. So, what exactly happened? That’s what scientists are trying to figure out now.
“This is the first time we have been able to link the launching of the corona to a flare,” Dan Wilkins, of Saint Mary’s University, said. “This will help us understand how supermassive black holes power some of the brightest objects in the universe.”
NuSTAR’s principal investigator, Fiona Harrison, noted that the nature of the energetic source is “mysterious,” but added that the ability to actually record the event should provide some clues about the black hole’s size and structure, along with (hopefully) some fresh intel on how black holes function. Luckily for us, this black hole is still 324 million light-years away.
So, no matter what strange things it’s doing, it shouldn’t have any effect on our corner of the universe.
When they saw me in my space suit and the parachute dragging alongside as I walked, they started to back away in fear. I told them, don’t be afraid, I am a Soviet citizen like you, who has descended from space. And I must find a telephone to call Moscow.
Yuri Gagarin, the first human to travel to space; upon re-entry Gagarin landed 280 kilometers away from the intended landing site, to the surprise of a farmer and his daughter who watched him fall from the sky (via whats-out-there)
is there a smell comparable to space ? i assume we dont know because we would die if we tried to smell it but thats so cool
yeah if humans tried to smell space just like that, we’d die, no doubt about it
but the smell of space lingers on spacewalk suits, and docking hatches when astronauts open them!
apparently, space itself smells like burning hot metal, or a hot barbeque grill with a slight hint of spent gasoline. The moon, apparently, smells like a gun after its been shot!
The coolest thing about it all is that the smell is actually what are left of dying stars- it’s literally the smell of stardust, and the particles smell like that because they’re so rich in hydrocarbons- something so very essential to life, and speculated by a lot of astronomers and astrobiologists and such to be the very thing life on earth started from!
another neat fact is that no two solar systems smell the same- ours smells like that because our solar system in particular is extremely rich in carbon, and other solar systems and places in the universe will have extremely different smells depending on what elements are most abundant in their system!
Space is so creepy and wonderful. Who the hell needs hell when there’s space.
Like there’s an old constellation called Eridanus that you can see in the southern sky, and its not a very interesting constellation. It’s a river. It’s actually the water that’s pouring out of Aquarius, so in the sky it’s kind of boring. It’s a path of stars.
But within Eridanus, in between the stars, there’s a place where the background radiation is unexplainably cold. Because after the Big Bang, there was all this light that scattered everywhere, and it’s the oldest light in the universe, but we can’t see it. It’s so dim that it only shows up as a glow of microwaves, so to us, it just looks like the blackness of the night.
But there’s this spot in Eridanus where that little glow of ancient microwaves isn’t what it should be. It’s cold and dark.
And it’s enormous. Like a billion light year across. Of mostly just emptiness. And we don’t know why. One theory is that it’s simply a huge void, like a place where there are no galaxies. Voids like that do exist. Most of them are smaller, but they’re a sort of predictable part of the structure of the universe. The cold spot in Eridanus, if it were a void, would be so enormous that it would change how we understand the universe.
But another theory is that this cold spot is actually the place where a parallel universe is tangled with our own.