Word: spacecrafts
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...have water locked in permafrost at its poles. Jupiter's moon Europa is probably home to a globe-girdling ocean beneath a thin rind of ice, and its Jovian sisters Callisto and Ganymede appear to be icy and wet too. Now, according to new findings by the Cassini spacecraft, one more name can be added to the list of water worlds: Enceladus, a small moon orbiting Saturn. What's more, Enceladus' water might be unusually hospitable to the emergence of life. (See the 50 highs and lows of space exploration...
...space program: we may have spent the past 40 years mostly ignoring the moon, but when we go back, we go back with a bang. Later today - if weather conditions and hardware permit - NASA will launch its much anticipated and deeply imaginative Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), the first American spacecraft of any kind to make a lunar trip since 1999. Not only will the LRO help us study the moon in greater detail than ever before, it should also give us our first look at the six Apollo landing sites since we abandoned the historic campgrounds two generations...
...long, 2-ton spacecraft is not designed for a landing, but rather will settle into a low lunar orbit just 30 miles (48 km) above the surface, or about half the altitude at which the Apollos flew. The ship will be fairly stuffed with scientific instruments, one of the most important - if least sexy sounding - of which will be its laser altimeter. The altimeter will bounce laser beams off the lunar surface and, by measuring the speed at which they reflect back up, calculate the moon's topography to within inches. That's critical since long-term lunar stays require...
...bringing it all with them is out of the question. (A single pint of water weighs about a pound, and every pound you fly to the moon costs about $50,000.) The LRO, however, will not be traveling alone. Launched on the same booster will be another entire spacecraft known as the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS...
...point of the telescopes, which cost a combined $2.5 billion, might seem abstract to a public that associates space missions with moon walks and Star Trek. But that misses the bigger picture, according to Colin Pillinger, who led the 2003 Beagle 2 project to land a spacecraft on the surface of Mars. "People always say these big questions don't have anything to do with their day-to-day life," he says. "But we get all sorts of spin-offs from asking about the universe. The technologies generated include carbon fibers, new electronic systems and sophisticated radio technologies. And perhaps...