NASA’s Juno spacecraft is scheduled to enter orbit around our solar system’s largest planet on the July 4th holiday. While the probe will be trying to avoid fireworks on Independence Day, it will instead be treated to an amazing view of Jupiter, a colorful globe of storms 300 times more massive than the Earth.
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On September 8, 1966, the first episode in a television series that would come to revolutionize television aired: simply called ‘Star Trek’, this science-fiction show would change the way stories were told, the way we would view the world, and influence our concept of technology. One of the radical departures that Star Trek made was it’s use of "warp drive" as their starship’s method of propulsion: where previous series would simply use old-fashioned rockets, the U.S.S. Enterprise would warp the very fabric of spacetime itself, enabling faster-than-light travel, and simultaneously negating the unwanted time-dilatation and mass increase as predicted by the Theory of Relativity.
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Launched on May 18, 1969, the Apollo 10 lunar mission sent three men, Thomas P. Stafford, John W. Young, and Eugene A. Cernan, into orbit around the moon, the first mission in history to do so. When their command module, nicknamed "Charlie Brown", orbited to the far side of the moon, communication with Earth was impossible, since the moon readily blocked radio transmissions. However, in place of mission control’s far away voice, the crew instead picked up on a mysterious transmission, according to a new documentary.
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The National Aeronautics and Space Administration has released an animation on their website that illustrates how average global surface temperatures have risen since record-keeping started in the late 19th century. The video helps to visually illustrate the rise of Earth’s temperatures, spanning a 135-year period from when temperature records were first recorded, in 1880, through 2015, the hottest year on record.
The baseline average used in the video was derived from temperature averages from 1951 through 1980, with blue colors representing below-average trends, and orange representing above average temperatures.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration also released a similar video, showing the same warming trend over the past 135 years. read more