Rumi Nations

As New Horizons closes in on its Pluto encounter, some facts about it to blow one's mind. New Horizons approximate distance from Earth : 3 billion miles; 4.8 billion kilometers (32.28 astronomical units) New Horizons approximate distance from Pluto : 93 million miles; 149 million kilometers (1 AU) Time for signal to reach Earth : 4 hours, 28 minutes, 31 seconds Primary communications : NASA Deep Space Network Canberra Station, Australia (70-meter antenna) Simple calculations show that at the enormous distance of 4.8 billion kms where Pluto is, one arcsecond equals some 24,000 kms. Hence, when they point that " big seven-foot, high-gain dish antenna" of the New Horizons spacecraft towards Earth, they've to be pretty precisely so that the signal is received in Canberra. If you are about 15 arcseconds off, instead of the Earth, you might be pointing to the Moon.

Emily Lakdawala has written a passionate blog post about the great stuff that are going to happen next year. And she wants the readers to 'spread the word' about all that since the public is insufficiently aware of all that as of now.

Sagan begins this episode talking about his childhood years in Brooklyn. He describes how as one grows up ANYWHERE, one's world keeps getting bigger. Sagan goes back to the Greek islands from 2,600 years ago where people first developed the scientific method. Sagan goes even further back in time to our hunter-gatherer ancestors and wonders if they ever wondered about the stars and how they would have reasoned. We are all children of astronomers of course, like Sagan has said in one of these episodes somewhere. It is awe-inspiring to realize that people made simple extrapolations and realized that those little points of lights in the night sky had to be like our sun and that there might be planets and life around those stars too. And here we are, more than 2,000 years on, and we are still searching for the answers to those questions posed a long time back. It's tough to find the answers to some questions. I was thinking of what questions I could pose today that humanity would st...