Astronomy

[Dreamwoven]

That's a very good question. It highlights a weakness in our current understanding. i guess the answer is that water came to Planet Earth millions of years ago, when space was much more turbulent than today (is this even true?).

[Dreamwoven]

This post on Ceres and its white spots is of interest:
http://www.space.com/33302-ceres-bri...mposition.html

[Dreamwoven]

This post on the Juno Mission gives lots of new information: http://www.space.com/33298-nasa-juno...ion-facts.html

[Dreamwoven]

This post one Pluto - http://earthsky.org/space/pluto-spac...w-mission-mu69 - has some interesting facts around the 2-year extension to its mission, as well as the picture of Pluto's surface.

[YesNo]

It is interesting that the computer aboard Juno can't hold as much memory as my laptop, not that I really use my laptop memory as much as I used to with the cloud being available. (Probably I should consider backing up what I have on the cloud somewhere else?)

That they might have got the explanation for the bright spots on Ceres wrong is to be expected. Sometimes we take speculations as if they are facts. It is good to be surprised by new speculations and evidence.

[Dreamwoven]

A new dark spot on Neptune: http://earthsky.org/space/a-new-dark-spot-on-neptune

[YesNo]

It is amazing how much of the knowledge of our solar system is recent. We should send more probes out.

[Dreamwoven]

There are several already, Mars exploration, New Horizons, and still getting material from the probe Dawn, to Ceres, and much work with telescopes, both from Earth and space-based telescopes. Here is also a discussion of growing food on Mars, on a permanent base (one-way only, for people to spend their lives on Mars) as a private initiative: http://earthsky.org/space/can-we-grow-food-on-mars

[YesNo]

We might as well give all of these a try. I would think we should first experiment with the Moon.

[Dreamwoven]

There are more that I missed. Cassini at Titan has been at work for nearly 20 years, just on Saturn and its moon Titan. It is quite hard to keep up with NASA but in addition there are new countries, like India.

[Dreamwoven]

This is the link to the Titan research: http://www.space.com/15257-titan-sat...ery-sdcmp.html

[Dreamwoven]

This is a link to a discussion about "how can the universe expand faster than the speed of light?": http://www.space.com/33306-how-does-...han-light.html. Certainly hard to wrap anyone's mind around...

[Dreamwoven]

The Juno probe has successfully entered Jupiter's orbit. Read about it here: http://www.space.com/33343-nasa-juno...s-jupiter.html

[YesNo]

The article said that Juno made a flyby of earth to increase speed to get to Jupiter. So it must have come back to earth, but earth would have been at a different position in the solar system by then.

[tailor STATELY]

The article said that Juno made a flyby of earth to increase speed to get to Jupiter. So it must have come back to earth, but earth would have been at a different position in the solar system by then.

... yup, it was quite a dance; the math must have been very dicey.

Ta ! (short for tarradiddle),
tailor STATELY