Infotainment

NASA’s Cassini space probe has been one of the agency’s most successful missions ever. It has been collecting intelligence on Saturn for a decade now, giving astronomers amazing new insights while several times exceeding expectations for its overall lifespan. Perhaps more importantly, the probe has supplemented its scientific data with incredible optical photos that have captured the public imagination on more than one occasion; Cassini actually managed to squeeze some real enthusiasm from a jaded and desensitized population. Now, though, its time has finally come. In 2016, after more than 11 years spent circling the famously ringed planet, Cassini will embark on its last mission ever. Now that we have a plan for the probe’s final days, it’s worth taking a look back at its incredible, decade-long history. Cassini (actually called the Cassini-Huygens Probe) launched with a wide array of goals. NASA wanted to learn about the composition and flow of the rings, the che

After forty years of venturing no farther than low Earth orbit, NASA may have decided to establish a manned outpost at a greater distance than humanity has ever traveled before. According to documents seen by the  Orlando Sentinel , NASA has chosen a  proposal  to build a space station beyond the Moon that will act as a “gateway spacecraft” to explore the Moon, the asteroids  and eventually as a staging post to launch a manned mission to Mars. The documents refer to a project that NASA Chief Charlie Bolden briefed  the White House  on earlier this month. They describe a deep space habitat that would be built at Earth-Moon Lagrange 2 (EML-2) – a point in space 38,000 miles (61,000 km) on the far side of the Moon and 277,000 miles (446,000 km) from Earth. The outpost wouldn’t orbit the Moon. Instead, at EML-2 the gravitational and centrifugal forces of the  Earth and Moon  balance out and an object placed there will remain suspended like one of those desktop novelty  floating glo