A Flight Above Mars [video]

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Most-Distant Object Gets Visit By NASA on 1/1/19

According to Popular Science –

Get ready to meet 2014 MU69 (unofficially known as Ultima Thule), an object a billion miles beyond Pluto and 4.1 billion from Earth itself. On January 1, at around 12:33 a.m. Eastern Time, New Horizons will make get to within 2,200 miles away fromMU69—which sounds like quite a distance, but is actually three times closer than how far the spacecraft was from Pluto during its 2015 flyby (when it managed to capture many stunning images).

Continue reading HERE.

China Plans to Launch an ‘Artificial Moon’ to Light Up the Night

According to Time.

Scientists are hoping to hang the man-made moon above the city of Chengdu, the capital of China’s southwestern Sichuan province, according to a report in Chinese state media. The imitation celestial body — essentially an illuminated satellite — will bear a reflective coating to cast sunlight back to Earth, where it will supplement streetlights at night.

Continue reading HERE.

Also, this video pokes holes in the idea.

12 New Moons Found Orbiting Jupiter

According to ExtremeTech –

Famed astronomer Galileo Galilei discovered the first four moons of Jupiter way back in the early 1600s. More than 400 years later, astronomers are still finding moons orbiting the solar system’s largest planet. We’re not just talking about one or two stragglers, either. Astronomers from the Carnegie Institution for Science have spotted 12 new moons orbiting Jupiter, bringing the total to 79.

Continue reading HERE.

Moon Setting Behind Teide Volcano [video]

New Record – Photo Taken Most Distant From Earth

According to TheVerge –

The previous record holder for the farthest picture was NASA’s Voyager 1. The probe, which flew by Jupiter and Saturn before heading out to interstellar space, captured a distant picture of Earth on February 14th, 1990, when Voyager 1 was 3.75 billion miles away. Known as the “Pale Blue Dot,” it was the last picture Voyager 1 took before its cameras were turned off shortly afterward.

Voyager 1’s record remained unbroken for 27 years until December 5th, 2017, when New Horizons snapped its photo of the cluster at a distance of 3.79 billion miles from Earth. Then, the spacecraft broke its own record again two hours later, when it took photos of two objects in the Kuiper Belt, the large cloud of icy objects at the edge of the Solar System that New Horizons is currently traversing.

Continue reading HERE.

 

 

Image by NASA , via Wikimedia Commons

Mercury Fly-Over [video]