June 8, 2015 - How to Get a Spacecraft Named After You
How to Get a Spacecraft Named After You It’s really quite simple to have an interplanetary spacecraft named after you. All you have to do is be the first person to calculate how fast Jupiter rotates, compute a table of the motions of its moons, and determine the first accurate distances to Mars and the Sun. And it helps if you discover at least four satellites of Saturn (Iapetus, Rhea, Dione and Tethys) and identify a prominent gap in Saturn’s rings. Giovanni Cassini, born 390 years ago this week, did all of these things, and the Cassini spacecraft that has been orbiting Saturn since 2004 is named in his honor. In this spectacular false-color Cassini image, the angry eye of a hurricane-like storm at Saturn’s north pole appears dark red, while the fast-moving hexagonal jet stream framing it is a yellowish green.
Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / SSI
Weekly Calendar
June 8-14, 2015
Holidays - Sky Events - Space History
Monday 8
Neptune 3° south of Moon
1625: Giovanni Cassini born
1959: First X-15 unpowered glide test
1975: Venera 9 launched
2007: STS-117 Atlantis launched
Tuesday 9
Last Qtr Moon 11:42 AM ET
1812: Johann Gottfried Galle born
Wednesday 10
Moon at perigee
1985: Vega 1 deploys lander and balloon on Venus
2003: Mars rover Spirit launched
Thursday 11
Mercury appears stationary
Uranus 0.5° north of Moon
Pallas at opposition
2008: Fermi Gamma-Ray Telescope launched
2013: Shenzhou 10 launched, China's fifth human spaceflight mission
Friday 12
Neptune appears stationary
1967: Venera 4 launched
Saturday 13
1831: James Clerk Maxwell born
1974: National Space Society founded
1983: Pioneer 10 leaves solar system, begins traveling in interstellar space
2010: Hayabusa spacecraft returns first asteroid samples to Earth
2012: NuSTAR X-Ray telescope launched
Sunday 14
Flag Day
Mars in conjunction with Sun
Mercury 0.04° north of Moon
1967: Mariner 5 launched
1975: Venera 10 launched
1985: Vega 2 deploys lander and balloon on Venus