Falcon 9 (is a partially reusable medium lift launch vehicle that can carry cargo and crew into Earth orbit, produced by American aerospace company SpaceX. The rocket has two stages. The first (booster) stage carries the second stage and payload to a certain altitude, after which the second stage lifts the payload to its ultimate destination. The rocket evolved through several versions. V1.0 flew from 2010–2013, V1.1 flew from 2013–2016, while V1.2 Full Thrust first launched in 2015, encompassing the Block 5 variant, flying since May 2018. The booster is capable of landing vertically to facilitate reuse. This feat was first achieved on flight 20 in December 2015. Since then, SpaceX has successfully landed boosters over 100 times.[16] Individual boosters have flown as many as fourteen flights. Both stages are powered by SpaceX Merlin engines, using cryogenic liquid oxygen and rocket-grade kerosene (RP-1) as propellants. The heaviest payloads flown to geostationary transfer orbit (GTO) were Intelsat 35e carrying 6,761 kg (14,905 lb), and Telstar 19V with 7,075 kg (15,598 lb). The former was launched into an advantageous super-synchronous transfer orbit, while the latter went into a lower-energy GTO, with an apogee well below the geostationary altitude. Falcon 9 is human-rated for transporting NASA astronauts to the ISS. Falcon 9 is certified for the National Security Space Launch program and NASA Launch Services Program as "Category 3", which can launch the most expensive, important, and complex NASA missions. The first mission launched on 8 October 2012. As of January 2021, Falcon 9 had the most launches among U.S. rockets. It is the only U.S. rocket certified for transporting humans to the International Space Station. It is the only commercial rocket to ever launch humans to orbit. On 24 January 2021, Falcon 9 set a record for the most satellites launched by a single rocket, carrying 143 into orbit)

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Ganymede, a satellite of Jupiter (Jupiter III), is the largest and most massive of the Solar System's moons. The ninth-largest object (including the Sun) of the Solar System, it is the largest without a substantial atmosphere (albeit not the most massive one, this is Mercury). It has a diameter of 5,268 km (3,273 mi), making it 26 percent larger than the planet Mercury by volume, although it is only 45 percent as massive. Possessing a metallic core, it has the lowest moment of inertia factor of any solid body in the Solar System and is the only moon known to have a magnetic field. Outward from Jupiter, it is the seventh satellite and the third of the Galilean moons, the first group of objects discovered orbiting another planet. Ganymede orbits Jupiter in roughly seven days and is in a 1:2:4 orbital resonance with the moons Europa and Io, respectively.

Ganymede is composed of approximately equal amounts of silicate rock and water. It is a fully differentiated body with an iron-rich, liquid core, and an internal ocean that may contain more water than all of Earth's oceans combined. Its surface is composed of two main types of terrain. Dark regions, saturated with impact craters and dated to four billion years ago, cover about a third of it. Lighter regions, crosscut by extensive grooves and ridges and only slightly less ancient, cover the remainder. The cause of the light terrain's disrupted geology is not fully known, but was likely the result of tectonic activity due to tidal heating

Ganymede photographed by Juno in 2021

Hercules Cluster (is a cluster of about 200 galaxies some 500 million light-years distant in the constellation Hercules. It is rich in spiral galaxies and shows many interacting galaxies. The cluster is part of the larger Hercules Supercluster, which is itself part of the much larger Great Wall super-structure. The cluster's brightest member is the giant elliptical galaxy NGC 6041)

YouTube

Interacting Galaxies In The Hercules Cluster [720p]

The VLT Survey Telescope (VST) at ESO's Paranal Observatory in Chile has imaged a fascinating collection of interacting galaxies in the Hercules galaxy clust...

not to be confused with..........................

Hercules A (is a bright astronomical radio source within the vicinity of the constellation Hercules corresponding to the galaxy 3C 348)

both are found in..................

Hercules Constellation (is a constellation named after Hercules, the Roman mythological hero adapted from the Greek hero Heracles. Hercules was one of the 48 constellations listed by the second-century astronomer Ptolemy, and it remains one of the 88 modern constellations today. It is the fifth-largest of the modern constellations and is the largest of the 50 which have no stars brighter than apparent magnitude +2.5)

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1566 Icarus  (provisional designation: 1949 MA) is a large near-Earth object of the Apollo group and the lowest numbered potentially hazardous asteroid. It has is an extremely eccentric orbit (0.83) and measures approximately 1.4 km (0.87 mi) in diameter. In 1968, it became the first asteroid ever observed by radar. Its orbit brings it closer to the Sun than Mercury and further out than the orbit of Mars, which also makes it a Mercury-, Venus-, and Mars-crossing asteroid. This stony asteroid and relatively fast rotator with a period of 2.27 hours was discovered on 27 June 1949, by German astronomer Walter Baade at the Palomar Observatory in California. It was named after the mythological Icarus

Radar image of Icarus taken by the Goldstone Observatory in June 2015

Jupiter 2 ( was a starship designed and constructed by the United Global Space Force. The ship was engineered to transport a single family - the Robinson Family - in cryosleep to the planet Alpha Prime in the star system Alpha Centauri (though this is not stated in the movie). Their mission would be to travel at slower-than-light speed to Alpha Prime, and once they reached their destination they were to begin construction of a second Hypergate in orbit around their destination planet. Their mission was timed as such that by the time they had reached Alpha Prime, the first Hypergate orbiting Earth would be completed and the two gates would then be connected via hyperspace so as to allow the human species to journey to another planet capable of sustaining life and escape the dying Earth. The Jupiter consisted of an outer launch capsule, the Jupiter 1, and an interstellar starship, the Jupiter 2, equipped with a hydroponics bay, medical bay, and an experimental hyperdrive. The hyperdrive was meant to be used only when the construction of the Hypergates had been completed, otherwise the ship's escape vector would be random. The Jupiter 1 would first lift off via conventional propulsion into orbit from atop a launch tower and, once above the Earth, it would break apart explosively. The Jupiter 2 starship would then ignite its engines and begin its ten year mission to Alpha Prime)

Calling it a night...................

The Kepler Mission is specifically designed to survey our region of the Milky Way galaxy to discover hundreds of Earth-size and smaller planets in or near the habitable zone and determine the fraction of the hundreds of billions of stars in our galaxy that might have such planets.

The scientific objective of the Kepler Mission is to explore the structure and diversity of planetary systems. This is achieved by surveying a large sample of stars to:

• Determine the percentage of terrestrial and larger planets that are in or near the habitable zone of a wide variety of stars
• Determine the distribution of sizes and shapes of the orbits of these planets
• Estimate how many planets there are in multiple-star systems
• Determine the variety of orbit sizes and planet reflectivities, sizes, masses and densities of short-period giant planets
• Identify additional members of each discovered planetary system using other techniques
• Determine the properties of those stars that harbor planetary systems.

Light-Year (alternatively spelled light year, is a large unit of length used to express astronomical distances and is equivalent to about 9.46 trillion kilometers (9.46×1012 km), or 5.88 trillion miles (5.88×1012 mi). As defined by the International Astronomical Union (IAU), a light-year is the distance that light travels in a vacuum in one Julian year (365.25 days). Because it includes the time-measurement word "year", the term light-year is sometimes misinterpreted as a unit of time. The light-year is most often used when expressing distances to stars and other distances on a galactic scale, especially in non-specialist contexts and popular science publications. The unit most commonly used in professional astronomy is the parsec (symbol: pc, about 3.26 light-years) which derives from astrometry; it is the distance at which one astronomical unit subtends an angle of one second of arc)

Calling it a night............................................

The Mariner program was conducted by the American space agency NASA to explore other planets. Between 1962 and late 1973, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) designed and built 10 robotic interplanetary probes named Mariner to explore the inner Solar System - visiting the planets Venus, Mars and Mercury for the first time, and returning to Venus and Mars for additional close observations.

The program included a number of interplanetary firsts, including the first planetary flyby, the planetary orbiter, and the first gravity assist maneuver. Of the 10 vehicles in the Mariner series, seven were successful, forming the starting point for many subsequent NASA/JPL space probe programs. The planned Mariner Jupiter-Saturn vehicles were adapted into the Voyager program, while the Viking program orbiters were enlarged versions of the Mariner 9 spacecraft. Later Mariner-based spacecraft include Galileo and Magellan, while the second-generation Mariner Mark II series evolved into the Cassini–Huygens probe.

The total cost of the Mariner program was approximately $554 million

Mariner 2

Mariner 10

Nebula (is a distinct luminescent part of interstellar medium, which can consist of ionized, neutral or molecular hydrogen and also cosmic dust. Nebulae are often star-forming regions, such as in the "Pillars of Creation" in the Eagle Nebula. In these regions, the formations of gas, dust, and other materials "clump" together to form denser regions, which attract further matter, and eventually will become dense enough to form stars. The remaining material is then thought to form planets and other planetary system objects. Most nebulae are of vast size; some are hundreds of light-years in diameter. A nebula that is visible to the human eye from Earth would appear larger, but no brighter, from close by. The Orion Nebula, the brightest nebula in the sky and occupying an area twice the angular diameter of the full Moon, can be viewed with the naked eye but was missed by early astronomers. Although denser than the space surrounding them, most nebulae are far less dense than any vacuum created on Earth – a nebular cloud the size of the Earth would have a total mass of only a few kilograms. Earth's air has a density of approximately 1019 molecules per cubic centimeter; by contrast the densest nebulae can have densities of 10,000 molecules per cubic centimeter. Many nebulae are visible due to fluorescence caused by embedded hot stars, while others are so diffused that they can be detected only with long exposures and special filters. Some nebulae are variably illuminated by T Tauri variable stars. Originally, the term "nebula" was used to describe any diffused astronomical object, including galaxies beyond the Milky Way. The Andromeda Galaxy, for instance, was once referred to as the Andromeda Nebula (and spiral galaxies in general as "spiral nebulae") before the true nature of galaxies was confirmed in the early 20th century by Vesto Slipher, Edwin Hubble and others. Edwin Hubble discovered that most nebulae are associated with stars and illuminated by starlight. He also helped categorize nebulae based on the type of light spectra they produced)

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