Posts Tagged: planet

Pluto — The Word of the Year 2006

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According to the American Dialect Society, Pluto is the word of the year 2006. According to them: To pluto is to demote or devalue someone or something, as happened to the former planet Pluto when the General Assembly of the International Astronomical Union decided Pluto no longer met its definition of a planet. Read the […]

Solar System Live

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Have you seen this “live” Solar system simulator? Check out http://www.fourmilab.ch/cgi-bin/Solar — really cool! And don’t try to keep refreshing it to see how the planets move 🙂 The scale of the simulation is small enough so you can just about see a diferrence from day to day. You can try playing with the dates […]

Messenger Reaches Venus

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So, today at 8:34 am UTC Messenger has reaches Venus and it’s doing its first Venus flyby. Can’t wait for the first pictures to arrive. The mission timeline shows that this flyby is scheduled at about 3000 km, but the second fly by (which is only due in July 2007) will be much much lower, […]

New Horizons

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For those of you who haven’t heard about it yet, New Horizons is NASA’s mission to explore Pluto and the Kuiper Belt. The mission started back in January 2006 — and if you visit the mission’s site, the counters on the first page will tell you exactly, down to the very second, how long has […]