If you are looking for another gift idea for the holidays, maybe you should consider one of the many popular astronomy books. Here are the 10 most popular from Goodreads:
It’s great to see that Carl Sagan is still educating the public so many years after his death. As with the Voyager spacecraft, his words and contributions are traveling far and wide.
Image (Credit): The Orion Nebula. (NASA / ESA / JPL-Caltech)
This week’s image is from NASA’s now retired Spitzer Space Telescope as well as the agency’s Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE), now called NEOWISE. Here is a little more from the Sci.News story:
Also known as NGC 1976, Messier 42 (M42), LBN 974, or Sharpless 281, the Orion Nebula is a diffuse nebula in the constellation of Orion. It spans about 24 light-years and is located approximately 1,630 light-years away from Earth. It can be seen with the naked eye as a fuzzy patch surrounding the star Theta Orionis in the Hunter’s Sword, below Orion’s belt. At only 2 million years old, the Orion Nebula is an ideal laboratory for studying young stars and stars that are still forming. It offers a glimpse of what might have happened when the Sun was born 4.6 billion years ago.
Image (Credit): Official emblem of the Apollo 17 lunar landing mission. (NASA)
On this day in 1972, Apollo 17 commander Eugene Cernan was the last human to be on the Moon. He was the eleventh human to ever step on the Moon.
Here is the full crew of Apollo 17:
Eugene A. Cernan, Commander
Harrison H. Schmitt, Lunar Module Pilot
Ronald E. Evans, Command Module Pilot
Mr. Cernan, who passed away in 2017, was also part of the Apollo 10 mission that orbited the moon without landing (similar to the upcoming Artemis II mission).
With the successful orbit of the Orion spacecraft around the Moon this month, let’s hope the 50 year dryspell is finally over and the United States can again be the nation putting humans back on the lunar surface. Of course, we will be followed by others, including the Chinese. Yet it’s important the first space-faring nation get back in the game and restart the human exploration of the Moon, and then Mars soon thereafter.
Jeff Bezos’ space company Blue Origin is partnering with Boeing Co and Lockheed Martin Corp to pitch a lunar lander to NASA as the agency seeks to send humans to the moon again, the companies announced on Tuesday. The joint moon lander proposal, led by Blue Origin, marks the companies’ second attempt to win a coveted moon lander contract as NASA seeks more options for getting astronauts to the lunar surface under its multibillion dollar Artemis program.
Researchers from Western have shown that a fireball that originated at the edge of the Solar System was likely made of rock, not ice, challenging long-held beliefs about how the Solar System was formed. Just at the edge of our Solar System and halfway to the nearest stars is a collection of icy objects sailing through space, known as the Oort Cloud. Passing stars sometimes nudge these icy travellers towards the Sun, and we see them as comets with long tails. Scientists have yet to observe any objects in the Oort Cloud directly, but everything detected so far coming from its direction has been made of ice. Theoretically, the very basis of understanding our Solar System’s beginnings is built upon the foundation that only icy objects exist in these outer reaches and certainly, nothing made of rock.
The EnVision mission is ESA’s fifth medium-class mission to Venus. It’s being planned in a partnership between NASA and ESA, and NASA will be providing the synthetic aperture radar instrument, which will map the surface (much as Magellan did). In addition to the two radars, the orbiter will carry spectrometers to study the atmosphere and surface. They will monitor trace gases in the atmosphere and analyze surface composition. The idea is to look for surface changes that might be linked to signs of active volcanism. Along with the VERITAS and DAVINCI missions, EnVision should reveal all we need to know about volcanic activity on Venus.
Take a look at the image above. Can you determine where this image originated? Take a guess and then check your answer by going to the menu and selecting the “Where is This?” The Answer Sheet page.
Our Awesome Universe 