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When NASA's mighty Saturn V rocket launched the historic Apollo 11 mission to land the first men on the moon in 1969, the five powerful engines that powered the booster's first stage dropped into the Atlantic Ocean and were lost forever.
Lost, that is, until now.
A private expedition financed by Amazon.com founder and billionaire Jeff Bezos has discovered the five F-1 rocket engines used to launch Apollo 11 into space on July 16, 1969 and is drawing up plans to retrieve one or more so they can be publicly displayed.
"I'm excited to report that, using state-of-the-art deep sea sonar, the team has found the Apollo 11 engines lying 14,000 feet below the surface, and we're making plans to attempt to raise one or more of them from the ocean floor," Bezos wrote in a statement posted to the Bezos Expeditions website. "We don't know yet what condition these engines might be in - they hit the ocean at high velocity and have been in salt water for more than 40 years. On the other hand, they're made of tough stuff, so we'll see."
NASA's Saturn V remains today, more than 40 years later, the largest and most powerful rocket ever built. It used a cluster of five 12.2-foot (3.7-meter) wide F-1 engines as its foundation, with each 18.5-foot (5.6-meter) tall engine capable of generating 1.5 million pounds of thrust — about 32 million horsepower — as it burned about 6,000 pounds of rocket fuel every second.
Read the entire article:
http://www.space.com/15075-apollo-11-moon-rocket-engines-discovered.html
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Some 22,000 chunks of space junk zip around the earth. On Saturday, six International Space Station astronauts scrambled for safety as a piece of a Russian satellite whizzed by.
The six earthlings – three Russians, two Americans, and a Dutchman – aboard the International Space Station were stirred from their slumber Saturday morning to jump into emergency escape pods, once again drawing into focus the growing dangers of hurtling space junk.
The astronauts, orbiting 200 miles above the planet, were told by ground control to scramble into two docked Soyuz spacecrafts in case a piece of a wrecked Russian satellite should smash into the ISS, which could have heavily damaged the platform as both objects were traveling at orbital speeds – 17,500 miles per hour. The emergency was called off after the chunk passed by at an approximate distance of nine miles – which in space terms is a near-miss.
Read the entire article:
http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/2012/0324/Astronauts-scramble-for-escape-pods-as-space-junk-threat-gets-serious
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Happy 20th Birthday to the Hubble Space Telescope! While we should be showering HST with gifts, instead the telescope provides this present to us: an amazing view of what has been nicknamed "Mystic Mountain. " It is just a small portion of one of the largest known star-birth regions in the galaxy, the Carina Nebula. Three light-year-tall towers of cool hydrogen laced with dust rise from the wall of the nebula.
The scene is reminiscent of Hubble’s classic “Pillars of Creation” photo from 1995, but even more striking. "Mystic Mountain has clouds of gas and dust, that have not only baby stars, but also baby solar systems," said John Grunsfeld, Hubble-hugger, repairman and now the Deputry Director of the Space Telescope Science Institute. "4.5 billion years ago, this may be what our solar system looked like."
Read the entire article:
http://www.universetoday.com/2010/04/23/hubbles-birthday-gift-to-us-mystic-mountian/
Also be sure to check out the Hubble gallery:
http://hubblesite.org/gallery/
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So you've decided to take the plunge and get a telescope. Congratulations! That alone is a big step. But what comes next? Not an impulsive shopping trip to the nearest mall! Buying a telescope is very different than buying a television, and department-store salespeople rarely understand what amateur astronomers need.
Rule Number One: shun the flimsy, semi-toy, "500 power!" department-store scopes that may have caught your eye. The telescope you want has two essentials: high-quality optics and a steady, smoothly working mount. You may also want the telescope to be nice and large, but don't forget portability and convenience. Your first telescope shouldn't be so awkward heavy that you can't tote it outdoors, set it up, and take it down reasonably easily.
To read the entire article:
http://www.skyandtelescope.com/howto/howtoequipment/3304526.html?page=1&c=y
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