New Horizons Probe In Jupiter Flyby
Jan. 12th, 2007 05:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fiat_knoxNASA's New Horizons probe bound for Pluto is headed for a Jupiter flyby, its camera eyes wide open, in preparation for its swing out towards the fringe of the solar system.
New Horizons began taking black-and-white images of Jupiter and scanning the planet's icy moon Callisto in the infrared this week as it prepares for a close encounter with the gas giant next month.
"They're certainly all we could have hoped for," New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern, of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, said Thursday of the new Jupiter images. "We're still 100 million kilometers out. We're going to get 50 times closer, but they are very nice." More ...
New Horizons began taking black-and-white images of Jupiter and scanning the planet's icy moon Callisto in the infrared this week as it prepares for a close encounter with the gas giant next month.
"They're certainly all we could have hoped for," New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern, of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, said Thursday of the new Jupiter images. "We're still 100 million kilometers out. We're going to get 50 times closer, but they are very nice." More ...
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2007-01-13 09:55 am (UTC)*which I find fascinating
In the long term ...
Date: 2007-01-13 03:58 pm (UTC)500 years ago, the oceans were to men what space is to us today. It was an expensive, riskful venture, and there were all sorts of more pressing matters of trade and politics back home. But people sailed off in those ships, and they found the world anyway.
Today, space is the big, human adventure - the final frontier, as it were. With the resources of the solar system to hand, there'll be a hell of a lot more space for us to live in - and the problems of our century will seem laughable to the men and women of the future.
So we have to look at the long term, the really long term, for the species - and the space programme is just that.
If you were to try and get the human species to do something more earthbound, more in the short term, to "save our grandchildren," then perhaps we could stop doing some things instead.
Stop waging warfare.
Stop stripmining the planet.
Stop porn.
Stop beer.
Stop sports.
Stop the sale of junk food to kids.
Perhaps the space programme should be left intact, and humans should look to the above priorities first - which we can do.