Posts Tagged ‘Spacecraft’
Oh Snap, Pictures of Pluto
Guess what? Earth people (or at least devices built by Earth people, specifically people at NASA) have finally gotten close to Pluto. And they took pictures!
From BusinessInsider:
“People didn’t think it could be done … but it’s worked essentially flawlessly for the last nine years,” Alan Stern, principal investigator of New Horizons, said about the spacecraft and its mission on Tuesday at a NASA briefing.
For decades, the Plutonian system was the only one of the original nine planetary systems in the solar system unexplored by the space agency.
Now, NASA has become the first organization to reach the dwarf planet and its moons, and it can finally tick off that empty check box marked “Pluto.”
Usually I hope for the discovery of alien beings on other worlds. In this case, though, I kinda hope there aren’t any Plutonians. If there are, I hope they don’t mind that we demoted their world to “dwarf planet” status awhile back.
This of course assumes that the Plutonians are capable of aggressive action, and if so, are interested in attacking us. Which is not a given. The planet could be populated by super-intelligent shades of the color blue, for example. (Apologies to Douglas Adams.)
No matter what, I say GO NASA GO! YAY SPACE TRAVEL! (Remember when we said it was time to get more excited about space travel? We meant it. Yay outer space!)
Source: Humankind visits Pluto for first time – Business Insider
