Solar System

Hubble’s official website in a table entitled Hubble at a Glance… 1. It cost about $1.5bn to launch alongside the shuttle Discovery on April 24th 1990. (Evans) 2. It is almost 44 feet in length and weighs around 24, 500 lbs. (Evans) 3. It has two 25 ft. solar panels that provide the power source for the telescope’s functions. (Evans) 4. It carries out its extraordinary work while orbiting the Earth at around 17,500 mph and making a complete revolution in 97 minutes. (Evans) B. The Hubble has…

Discoveries about dark matter, high-speed gas clouds, and a small disk around the core are now leading scientists to a new understanding of how our galaxy formed and the way it works, by John S. Gallagher III, Rosemary Wyse, and Robert Benjamin. Our understanding of the Milky Way has come a long way from the time people wove a story about the milk of a goddess spilled across the heavens. About 400 years ago, Galileo Galilei aimed a primitive telescope toward that area and wrote that through it…

Lesson is for 2nd or 3rd graders Engage: The teacher will present the class with a fish tank full of water, and will begin to tilt it back and forth to make waves inside the tank. Students will be asked what is causing waves to form inside the tank? After the teacher has listened and responded to each student’s answer, the teacher will then ask multiple questions for class discussion before the lesson, such as what makes water tides? What is gravity? Does the moon or the sun affect the…

There are many benefits of investing in our space program. There are many reasons why the space program deserves us investing money in it. One of the many ways that investing in the space program is it could pay off in the long run. They are finding places that the human population could possibly move to in the future in case earth is in jeopardy in someway. America and other places all around the world are also finding out ways to mine asteroid incase earth runs out of resources. Those are…

A recent study on Mars’s geology causes a paradigm shift to researchers’ perspective of the red planet. Felsic rocks that thought to not exist on Mars are now identified. Overall, these findings alter the understanding of the geologic complexity and magmatic activity of Mars. Prior knowledge of Mars’s geology was rather simple; consisting of one type of rock formation in contrast to Earth’s diverse and complex geology. Felsic rocks such as granite, are common in subduction zones on Earth (Wray…

We researched Pluto’s orbit, physical properties, and history to give us a broad understanding of what Pluto is like and to see if a mission to Pluto would be feasible and beneficial to NASA. We found that Pluto has a unique orbit compared to other planets — it is both extremely elliptical and sometimes crosses Neptune's orbit. Pluto is also incredibly small and cold. It contains ice on it’s surface and was only discovered about 100 years ago. Because of what I learned, I believe that It would…

The video we watched in lab, “Life and Death of a Star,” gave us incredible information regarding the life cycle of a star. There are billions of stars out there and in our galaxy, we have about four billion. Stars, which are ignited by the power of the atom, burning with light, heat and wrath, stars are anything but peaceful. They collide, devour each other, and explode in enormous supernovas. These “supernovas” are known to be the largest explosion in the universe. Throughout the video, we…

Institute currently uses one main instrument/tool to search for extraterrestrial signals. This instrument/tool is called the Allen Telescope Array. The Allen Telescope Array, also known as A.T.A., is a system of radio dishes that was initially developed using both the efforts of the S.E.T.I. Institute and the Radio Astronomy Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley. Funding for the Allen Telescope Array came from Microsoft billionaire, Paul…

If you ever happen to turn on The History Channel, you'll notice that the channel has gone from showing actual moments in history to hypothetical moments in history that probably never happened at all. Ancient Aliens is basically a show that shows people with little to no educational background in an subject close to Astronomy. For Example: That guy with the crazy hair, Giorgio A. Tsoukalos, is a 1998 graduate of Ithaca College in Ithaca, New York, with a bachelor's degree in sports information…

The objects between 42 and 47 AU are in very stable orbits – not affected in any significant way by any of the planets. Like the “classical” planets, these objects are in nearly circular orbits, so were given the name “Classical KBOs” (CKBOs), by David Jewitt. Of the CKBOs, about one-third have a low orbital inclination of around 2o – these are the “Cold” CKBOs. The remaining two-thirds have a much higher inclination of up to 20o or more – the “Hot” CKBOs. Hot and cold do not have anything to do…