The end of the space shuttle program is a bittersweet chapter in America’s space exploration program, but it’s not the end of it, and that’s exciting. Who among us can forget staying up all night to watch Neil Armstrong step off the LEM? Man will take another giant leap – on Mars, if not an asteroid first. You and I may not live to see that day, but our progeny will. Meanwhile, NASA is scheduled to launch a bigger and better Mars rover by year’s end to learn more about our sister planet.
Other spectacular unmanned missions continue. The incredible Hubble Space Telescope has sent back some of the most awe-inspiring photographs of all time since its 1990 launch. And the HST just found a fourth moon orbiting Pluto three billion miles away.
Another telescope -- Chandra, launched and shuttle-deployed twelve years ago -- looks billions of light years into the history of our universe using its X-ray vision (literally) to unveil never-before-seen wonders in that part of the spectrum invisible to us humans.
A NASA probe named Dawn just entered orbit about Vesta, the 3rd largest body in the Asteroid Belt. So what? Vesta may not be an asteroid. It’s huge (330 miles in diameter) and not just a rock like other, much smaller asteroids. It has a crust, a mantle and a core, like Earth and the other interior planets. It could be one of Earth’s cousins. Five percent of the meteorites that fall to Earth come from Vesta.
These are but a fraction of the projects still underway to help explore the eternal question that Ellie Arroway posited in that movie: Why are we here?
Because God put us here? Absolutely. With an insatiable curiosity.
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