Orbiter now includes Duncan Sharpe's TransX MFD mode, which is a great tool for setting up interplanetary routes. You need to activate the TransX module in the Orbiter Launchpad dialog to use this. TransX is quite a complex navigation tool, so to understand the concept and options, make sure you read the TransX manual (in the Doc folder) carefully.

Finding life on Mars would excite researchers for a variety of reasons. Firstly, it would just be interesting to know that life did (or does) exist elsewhere in the universe. Humans have been wondering about this question almost as long as we have been in existence. Finding evidence that suggests that we may not be alone, that Earth is not the only planet capable of sustaining life, would be an amazing revelation. As for scientists, many want to know how and why life was created on Earth.

NASA has explored the moon using robotic spacecraft, and we plan to continue to use robotic spacecraft to collect lunar data enabling human scientists to return to its surface. Science is just one reason for returning humans to the moon. The primary reason is that the moon provides opportunities to develop technologies and techniques needed for opening the space frontier. It allows us to learn how to survive long term stays on other worlds while only three days travel time from Earth.

Seasons are caused by the inclination of a planet's rotational axis relative to the plane of its orbit around the sun. Earth's axis is inclined 23.5 degrees. On the first day of summer in the northern hemisphere, Earth's north pole is tilted 23.5 degrees toward the sun, so the northern hemisphere receives more sunlight. Half a year later, on the first day of winter, Earth's north pole is tilted away from the sun, so the northern hemisphere receives less sunlight.

Essentially, an analemma is the pattern the sun makes in the sky if you plot its position at noon every day in the course of a year. If one had a sextant, a chronometer set to the time and date on the prime meridian, and an analemma chart, one could determine one's position with fairly good accuracy. The shape of the analemma is influenced by the magnitude and phasing of two factors: axial inclination and orbital eccentricity.

Mars and Earth are like two cars on a racetrack as they journey around the Sun. Earth is on the inside track and travels faster than Mars, which is on the outside. When Earth laps Mars about every two years, it comes as close as 35 million miles (56 million km) or as far away as 63 million miles (101 million km) because of Mars’ highly elongated orbit.

For two reasons, an Earth calendar will not work on Mars. First of all, a Martian sol is nearly forty minutes longer than an Earth day. This may not seem like much, but over the course of a month this difference accumulates to nearly an entire day. So if one tried to use an Earth calendar on Mars, the months that contain 31 days on Earth would generally have only 30 sols on Mars, and most of our 30-day months would be only 29 sols long on Mars.

The Sun rises in the East and sets in the West. The Moon does the same thing. It rises in the East and sets in the West.

More and more evidence is pointing to the Earth having a collision with another large object while the Earth was still a cooling molten body. This collision may actually have torn off a chunk which was captured into orbit and became what we know as our Moon. However, there has never been any evidence to suggest this large object was another planet, nor that it was on any kind of recurring cycle with Earth.

On average, the Moon is 240,250 miles (384,400 km) from the Earth. At the Moon's perigee (its closest approach to Earth in its elliptical orbit), it is 227,063 miles (363,300 km) away. At its apogee (the farthest distance away), the Moon is 253,438 miles (405,500 km) from the Earth. It circles the Earth with a mean orbital velocity of 2,300 miles per hour (3,680 km per hour).

discussed in the FUSE Observer's Guide , FUSE cannot actively track an object moving faster than 0.2 arcsec/sec, which precludes active tracking of the moon. It may be possible to make FUSE observations of the moon by pointing at an inertially-fixed position and allowing the moon to drift across the aperture.

No. A persistent rumor on the Internet has suggested this, but it's not true. Mars will appear to be about 90 times smaller than the Moon when it's closest to Earth on October 29th. It's still quite prominent in the sky, and it's an interesting object to examine with a telescope. GMU professor (and NOVAC member) Dr. Harold Geller has more details on this hoax on his Web site.

C5 is proud to partner with some of the most respected companies in the world such as Motorola, Nokia, Krusell, Smarteq, and Bracketron. We are also proud to work with such respected charitable foundations as the Susan G. Komen Foundation for Breast Cancer Research and the VFW (Veterans of Foreign Wars). C5 is recognized as the premier faceplate manufacturer in the world.

The Spiders From Mars were David Bowie/Ziggy Stardust's three-piece rock band from 1971 to mid 1973, however they were only officially known by this name following the album's release in June 1972. Bowie has said that the inspiration for the name came when he was writing the song "Ziggy Stardust". The band consisted of: quot;It was Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars and somehow, along the lines, the Spiders got attached to David Bowie.

This is very unlikely. All US space missions are required to meet planetary protection standards, and these standards are particularly stringent for Mars. As a Mars lander with no life detection experiments, the Mars Polar Lander is categorized as a Category IV A mission. This requires that the spacecraft has to be assembled in a class 100,000 clean room, and that contamination control effectiveness must be monitored and demonstrated by periodic microbiological assays.

Every chemical element present on SMART-1 and in its instruments exists naturally on the Moon. For instance aluminium and iron are very common. Hydrogen, carbon and nitrogen are much scarcer, but they arrive naturally onto the lunar surface from the solar wind and from the impacts of icy fragments of comets, which contain many elements. From this point of view, one can think of SMART-1 as an artificial comet.

Mars is the code name for a project developing an XML-based representation of PDF documents. XML, Extensible Markup Language, is a cross-platform, extensible, and text-based standard for representing data of all kinds. PDF, Portable Document Format, is the global standard to reliably view, print, and share documentation over the web and with other people, regardless of a computer's operating system. PDF preserves all of the fonts, formatting, colors, and graphics of any source document.