Do gravity holes harbour planetary assassins?
posted by Artw on Feb 21, 2009 - 24 comments

Mercury Messenger, a NASA probe, just performed a fly-by of Mercury at a height of 200 kilometers. It's the first spacecraft to visit Mercury since 1975.
posted by Artw on Jan 14, 2008 - 21 comments

NASA proposes using a Stirling cooler (essentially a Stirling engine in reverse) to keep a probe cool on the surface of Venus, which has had a tendency to melt or smash previous probes. The cooler would maintain a 25cm sphere within the probe at 200°C -- 100°C above the boiling point of water but sufficiently cool for a high-temperature microcontroller to operate. The waste heat radiators on the exterior of the sphere would reach the temperature of 500°C, 40°C above the the normal Venusian surface temperature.
posted by Artw on Nov 12, 2007 - 40 comments

Six million pixels from Gracela... er, Pluto. A scale model of our solar system. It turns out, we're really, really small.
posted by panoptican on Feb 12, 2005 - 52 comments

NASA finds gravitational 'space freeway' that runs through solar system ... Vorgon jokes aside, this could seriously reduce the amount of energy it takes to move around the solar system. [this is good]
posted by SpecialK on Jul 19, 2002 - 23 comments

I saw all five of the visible planets in our solar system tonight! And so can you, if you have clear skies and go outside between 8:45 and 9 p.m. your time this week. Disclaimer - my naked eyes weren't good enough to see Mercury but I could see it with binoculars.
posted by Lynsey on May 6, 2002 - 4 comments