Beams of light > Spectrum of lights > Space Exploration
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A mobile laboratory the size of a washing machine made history Wednesday when it completed a slow-motion descent to the surface of a comet 311 million miles from Earth.
The European Space Agency's Philae spacecraft initially landed close to its target site on the comet and beamed back its position to the Rosetta orbiter. ESA engineers headquartered in Darmstadt, Germany, received the first signal that the lander had made it to the surface after a long and agonizing wait. Scientists had slammed spacecraft into comets before, but had never gently landed on one. The ESA team conceived the risky Rosetta mission in the late 1980s to learn more about comets that formed from the same mix of gas, dust and other ingredients that would form the sun, Earth and other planets.
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The full eclipse of the moon started at 6:25 a.m. EDT and lasted until 7:24 a.m, according to NASA. Full lunar eclipses are often called "blood moons" because of the reddish tint they adopt as sunsets and sunrises seen from Earth reflect onto the surface of the moon.
Because this eclipse happened two days after a lunar perigee, which is the point when the moon is nearest to Earth, NASA says the moon appeared 5.3 percent larger than the previous "blood moon," which occurred on April 15, 2014.
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User Rating: 5 / 5
User Rating: 5 / 5
SpaceX unveiled its Dragon Version 2 spacecraft, the next generation spacecraft designed to carry astronauts to Earth orbit and beyond. The spacecraft will be capable of carrying up to seven crewmembers, landing propulsively almost anywhere on Earth, and refueling and flying again for rapid reusability. As a modern, 21st century manned spacecraft, Dragon V2 will revolutionize access to space.
Elon Musk, the chief executive of Hawthorne-based SpaceX, revealed its new Dragon V2 capsule on May, 2014. Musk hopes it will one day ferry NASA astronauts to the International Space Station and expects its first manned test flight by the end of 2016. "I'm hopeful that the first people could be taken to Mars in 10 to 12 years, I think it's certainly possible for that to occur," he said. "But the thing that really matters long term is to have a self-sustaining city on Mars. To make life multi-planetary," expressed Musk.
