2019.01.01 12:37
2019.01.01 12:44
2019.01.01 13:02
The two books, "The Future Of The Mind" and "The Future Of Humanity"
by Michio Kaku, which I just finished reading, clearly have helped me expand
my consciousness and my orientation in this universe. It was sort of an eye opening
experience. I highly recommend the books.
2019.01.02 10:44
2019.01.03 10:29
The Kuiper belt (/ˈkaɪpər/),[1] occasionally called the Edgeworth–Kuiper belt, is a circumstellar disc in the outer Solar System, extending from the orbit of Neptune (at 30 AU) to approximately 50 AU from the Sun.[2] It is similar to the asteroid belt, but is far larger—20 times as wide and 20 to 200 times as massive.[3][4] Like the asteroid belt, it consists mainly of small bodies or remnants from when the Solar System formed. While many asteroids are composed primarily of rock and metal, most Kuiper belt objects are composed largely of frozen volatiles (termed "ices"), such as methane, ammonia and water. The Kuiper belt is home to three officially recognized dwarf planets: Pluto, Haumea and Makemake. Some of the Solar System's moons, such as Neptune's Triton and Saturn's Phoebe, may have originated in the region.[5][6]
The Kuiper belt was named after Dutch-American astronomer Gerard Kuiper, though he did not predict its existence. In 1992, Albion was discovered, the first Kuiper belt object (KBO) since Pluto and Charon.[7]Since its discovery, the number of known KBOs has increased to over a thousand, and more than 100,000 KBOs over 100 km (62 mi) in diameter are thought to exist.[8] The Kuiper belt was initially thought to be the main repository for periodic comets, those with orbits lasting less than 200 years. Studies since the mid-1990s have shown that the belt is dynamically stable and that comets' true place of origin is the scattered disc, a dynamically active zone created by the outward motion of Neptune 4.5 billion years ago;[9] scattered disc objects such as Eris have extremely eccentric orbits that take them as far as 100 AU from the Sun.[nb 1]
The Kuiper belt is distinct from the theoretical Oort cloud, which is a thousand times more distant and is mostly spherical. The objects within the Kuiper belt, together with the members of the scattered disc and any potential Hills cloud or Oort cloud objects, are collectively referred to as trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs).[12] Pluto is the largest and most massive member of the Kuiper belt, and the largest and the second-most-massive known TNO, surpassed only by Eris in the scattered disc.[nb 1] Originally considered a planet, Pluto's status as part of the Kuiper belt caused it to be reclassified as a dwarf planet in 2006. It is compositionally similar to many other objects of the Kuiper belt and its orbital period is characteristic of a class of KBOs, known as "plutinos", that share the same 2:3 resonance with Neptune.(from Internet)
2019.01.04 12:32
New Horizons is an interplanetary space probe that was launched as a part of NASA's New Frontiers program.[3]Engineered by the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) and the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), with a team led by S. Alan Stern,[4] the spacecraft was launched in 2006 with the primary mission to perform a flyby study of the Pluto system in 2015, and a secondary mission to fly by and study one or more other Kuiper belt objects (KBOs) in the decade to follow.[5][6][7][8][9] It is the fifth space probe to achieve the escape velocity needed to leave the Solar System.
New Horizons space probe
nasa.gov/newhorizons
Elapsed: 12 years, 11 months, 13 days
New Frontiers program
Juno →
On January 19, 2006, New Horizons was launched from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station by an Atlas V rocket directly into an Earth-and-solar escape trajectory with a speed of about 16.26 kilometers per second (10.10 mi/s; 58,500 km/h; 36,400 mph). At launch, it was the fastest probe ever launched from Earth.[10] After a brief encounter with asteroid 132524 APL, New Horizons proceeded to Jupiter, making its closest approach on February 28, 2007, at a distance of 2.3 million kilometers (1.4 million miles). The Jupiter flyby provided a gravity assist that increased New Horizons' speed; the flyby also enabled a general test of New Horizons' scientific capabilities, returning data about the planet's atmosphere, moons, and magnetosphere.
Most of the post-Jupiter voyage was spent in hibernation mode to preserve on-board systems, except for brief annual checkouts.[11] On December 6, 2014, New Horizons was brought back online for the Pluto encounter, and instrument check-out began.[12] On January 15, 2015, the spacecraft began its approach phase to Pluto.
On July 14, 2015, at 11:49 UTC, it flew 12,500 km (7,800 mi) above the surface of Pluto,[13][14] making it the first spacecraft to explore the dwarf planet.[8][15] On October 25, 2016, at 21:48 UTC, the last of the recorded data from the Pluto flyby was received from New Horizons.[16] Having completed its flyby of Pluto,[17] New Horizonsthen maneuvered for a flyby of Kuiper belt object (486958) 2014 MU69,[18][19][20] which occurred on January 1, 2019,[21]when it was 43.4 AU from the Sun.[18][19] In August 2018, NASA cited results by Alice on New Horizons to confirm the existence of a "hydrogen wall" at the outer edges of the Solar System. This "wall" was first detected in 1992 by the two Voyager spacecraft.[22][23](from internet)