The NASA MESSENGER probe to Mercury is making its last fly-by of the planet today. It will go into orbit around Mercury in 2011, taking over seven years to make the trip. MESSENGER is only the second space probe to Mercury.
Orbiters have now been sent to every planet from Saturn on in. Pluto is the only planet that has not been visited by a fly-by mission, the New Horizons mission will do that in 2015.
Within the span of a single human lifetime, we will have gone from being able to briefly touch space with sounding rockets to sending robotic probes to all nine planets, into the Kuiper Belt and into interstellar space. If you're not awed by that, then maybe you ought to take a deep breath and look up to the night sky.
We may be looking at the end of the deep space missions, though, because there is little plutonium-238 left for the powr supplies of future probes. That would be a damned shame.
(Yes, I know that Pluto has been "demoted" to a "dwarf planet" by a bunch of humorless bastards. On this blog, Pluto is a planet. Suck it up and drive on if you don't like it.)
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2 comments:
"take a deep breath and look up to the night sky"
Fat lot of good that'll do...unless you live in one of a very few remaining places, you can't see it any more.
On this blog, Pluto is a planet.
Hear, hear!
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