Grumpyspacekid - Where Did You Come From And What Do You Want?

Almost everything we look at with regard to the Moon does not fit any known natural method of formation. Either our neighbor is artificial, or it is not. Scientists everywhere continue to find oddities that strongly indicate artificial origin. To form an object the size of our Moon requires physics, engineering and materials manufacturing technology far beyond anything we can imagine today.

Solar System: Things to Know This Week

Our solar system is huge, let us break it down for you. Here are a few things to know this week:

1. The View from the Far Shore

The rugged shores of Pluto’s highlands come into sharp view in a newly released image from our New Horizons spacecraft. This latest view zooms in on the southeastern portion of Pluto’s great ice plains, where they border dark highlands formerly named Krun Macula.

2. Dawn’s Latest Light

Our Dawn mission has now completed more than 1,000 orbital revolutions since entering into Ceres’ gravitational grip in March 2015. The probe is healthy and performing its ambitious assignments impeccably. See what it has revealed lately HERE.

3. Counting Down

Our OSIRIS-REx mission to the asteroid Bennu is now entering the final preparations for its planned launch in September. In a new interview, the mission’s principal investigator reports on the final pre-flight tests happening at our Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

4. Deep Dive

Three successful engine maneuvers to bring the lowest part of the spacecraft’s orbit down to just 74 miles (119 km) above the surface of Mars, the MAVEN mission’s fifth deep dip campaign has begun. MAVEN is studying the planet’s atmosphere up close.

5. Storm Season

Meanwhile, other robotic Mars orbiters have revealed that a pattern of three large regional dust storms occurs with similar timing most Martian years. The seasonal pattern was detected from dust storms’ effects on atmospheric temperatures, which spacecraft have been monitoring since 1997.

Want to learn more? Read our full list of the 10 things to know this week about the solar system HERE.

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com

Alexander Semenov Continues to Photograph the Earth’s Most Fragile Marine Wildlife Near the Arctic Circle

Humans and war

Okay, so as much as I love the humans are horrifying thing, there is one thing that bugs me. It seems like in fiction whenever other beings find out about our history, they end up getting all horrified and bring up the whole “are we worth saving” thing (looking at you 5th element). And that’s a valid point, human history is scary. But it always seems like we’re always the only ones out there like that.

There’s got to be some other race who wars constantly and is no stranger to interspecies violence and who upon reading our files just sort of shrugs and goes “yeah. Same.”

We may be scary but we can’t be the only ones, right?