New Horizons Releases Results

hendric writes to mention New Horizons had a press conference yesterday for the preliminary results from their Jupiter flyby. Quite a few images are also available on their site, like Europa Rising."

Comments

Move this title dammit !

[A_Lost_Frenchman]

You might want to see the photo of Europa rising from the original website : http://pluto.jhuapl.edu/gallery/missionPhotos/imag es/HighRes/050107/050107_01.jpg ( Especially after seeing the huge title across the first picture )

I suggested this and some other "Kodak Moments"

[hendric]

Before the flyby, the New Horizons science team asked a bunch of us amateurs at http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/ to search for "pretty pictures", pictures that didn't necessarily have scientific value, but were beautiful and worth taking. Europa Rising and the Io and Europa conjunction were the first two returned. The others I suggested were two double shadow transits, a crescent Callisto emerging from behind a crescent Jupiter, and a crescent Ganymede in front of a crescent Jupiter.
Enjoying my 15 minutes of fame. :)

Don't forget the gold

[Namarrgon]

Check out the asteroid belt, next time you're in the vicinity. It's a gold mine, in every sense. The amount of wealth out there is "beyond imagination".

Just one moderate-sized asteroid (Eros) is estimated to contain $1,000 billion in gold alone - more than has been mined (or indeed could ever be mined ) from Earth's crust in recorded history. Then there's the platinum and the other metals, minerals and rare earths, roughly $20,000 billion in total. And there's millions of asteroids in the belt.

It's not just the mineral wealth that has people interested. It's estimated that maybe half of the asteroids are carbonaceous, containing 20% water and a further 10% oxygen extractable from other sources (good fuel source stuff). Additionally, there are significant amounts of carbon and nitrogen - in total, enough basic resources to support human life on a huge scale. It's likely going to be easier to colonise the asteroids than to colonise Mars.