Astronomy

NASA has high hopes that they will be able to send people to the moon a year earlier then they planned. They had scheduled to send people in 2015.

At this time Congress is worried by the fact that we have to rely on Russia in order to make any trips to the International Space Station during that time. NASA is preparing for any demands that the new President might have and is working on a new study that pushes up the test launch of the brand new Ares rocketship.

Hundreds of photos of Mercury were beamed to Earth by a U.S. spacecraft. The photos showed images of landscapes on the surface of the planet that have never been seen before. They released four of these high resolution pictures to the media - which were posted on NASA’s Messenger web site.

Scientists are stumped by the fact that the sun has gone 200 days this year and no sunspots have been spotted. The sun has not been this blank since 1954 when it was spotless for a total of 241 days. Usually the sun will go through an 11 year cycle and scientists say that it is now coming from the quietest part of that cycle known as the solar minimum. Yet, for this particular phase it has been unusually quiet and had little of the roiling magnetic fields that cause sunspots.