Pluto has become one of our most favorite bodies in the solar system, perhaps gaining increased appreciation after it was demoted from a full-sized planet to dwarf planet in 2006 and thus decreasing our solar system planet count to eight planets. A significant portion of Pluto’s mass is icy material and so it is often referred …
Today’s guest blog post is by science fiction and fantasy author Fran Wilde, who will be visiting the Library on Dec. 3 to talk about “Flights of Fantasy and Fact: Man-made Wings in Literature and History”. Wilde is also a technology consultant and former engineering and science writer. Her short fiction has appeared in publications …
In late 2007 the Dawn mission spacecraft launched and began the 1.8 billion mile journey to the giant asteroid Vesta, which it reached in 2011. It was the first spacecraft to orbit a main-belt asteroid. In March 2015 it completed another 990 million miles to the dwarf planet Ceres and was the first spacecraft to …
Today’s guest post is by ST&B’s upcoming speaker Glenn “Marty” Stein, a maritime and polar historian who will be at the Library on October 29 to talk about his recent book “Discovering the North-West Passage: The Four-Year Arctic Odyssey of H.M.S. Investigator and the McClure Expedition” (McFarland & Co, 2015). Stein has researched maritime and …
The first exoplanets, or extrasolar planets, were definitively discovered in the 1990s, although the idea of other worlds like ours goes back to the ancient Greeks, and their existence had been theorized by Giordano Bruno in the 16th century and Isaac Newton in the 18th. The first direct images of exoplanets were produced in 2008. …
Did you know that there are frozen volcanoes that spew icy particles and water vapor, instead of fiery molten rock? You’ll have to travel millions or billions of miles into the outer solar system to find icy volcanism, also known as cryovolcanism. Many of NASA’s missions to the far-reaches of our solar system have provided evidence …
When we think of natural disasters, earthquakes, hurricanes, wildfires and floods often come to mind, but landslides are one of the most prevalent hazards that exist. NASA scientists study all of these, and the next speaker in our NASA/Goddard lecture series, Dalia Kirschbaum, specializes in the remote sensing and modeling of landslides. Dr. Kirschbaum will …
The universe is full of plasma and magnetic fields actively swirling, spiraling, and colliding. These mighty magnetic mysteries can cause gigantic explosions of energy such as solar flares, coronal mass ejections, and geomagnetic storms which often enhance the Earth’s auroras. Space weather is influenced by these highly charged events which can then cause havoc with …
Did I get your attention? Then read on!! Can you imagine a world where you stepped out for a five minute walk on a nice day and came back with a sunburn? You could be living in that world if scientists and policy makers hadn’t worked together back in the 1980’s to avoid it. Remember …
