Space Shuttle Desktop Backgrounds HD

The Space Shuttle was a partially reusable low Earth orbital spacecraft system that was operated from 1981 to 2011 by the U. S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) as part of the Space Shuttle program. Its official program name was Space Transportation System (STS), taken from a 1969 plan for a system of reusable spacecraft of which it was the only item funded for development. The first of four orbital test flights occurred in 1981, leading to operational flights beginning in 1982. In addition to the prototype whose completion was cancelled, five complete Shuttle systems were built and used on a total of 135 missions from 1981 to 2011, launched from the Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida. Operational missions launched numerous satellites, interplanetary probes, and the Hubble Space Telescope (HST); conducted science experiments in orbit; and participated in construction and servicing of the International Space Station. The Shuttle fleet’s total mission time was 1322 days, 19 hours, 21 minutes and 23 seconds.


Have you ever had one of those days fishing where it seemed like you could do no wrong? Like everything you tried resulted in fish being caught? And not only fish being caught, but large fish being caught? This was all probably due to the moon and what phase the moon was in. That's right, something as simple as what phase the moon is in can have an effect on your fishing success. However, the astronomers will require more HST observations in order to obtain accurate measurements in order to determine if the moon's orbit is circular or elliptical. Preliminary estimates suggest that if the moon is in a circular orbit, it finishes a circle around Makemake in 12 days or longer. Life as we know it depends on the presence of three ingredients: liquid water; a source of energy for metabolism; and the right chemical ingredients, mainly carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and sulfur. With this new discovery of the existence of hydrogen, in the tattle-tale plume shooting out from the surface of Enceladus, Cassini has revealed to the prying eyes of curious astronomers, that this small, icy moon has almost all of these ingredients important for habitability. At this point, Cassini has not detected the presence of phosphorus and sulfur in the hidden subsurface ocean of this distant small world, but many planetary scientists suspect that they will eventually be detected because the rocky core of Enceladus is believed to be similar to certain meteorities that contain these two critical elements.