Sentences with phrase «distant than the moon»

Noble as human exploration may be, we would know very little about anything in the cosmos much more distant than the moon were it not for robotic explorers.

The first image in the upper left was taken about 9.5 hours before closest approach, when Rosetta was still 510,000 km (315,000 miles) from the asteroid - more distant than the Moon is from the Earth!

Not exact matches

When the Air Force realized he was looking at distant stars rather than at the moon, they ended his program.

If the other moons have similar compositions, they may have lower than expected masses, which means this and other collisions may happen in the more distant future.

Picture distant blue stars brighter than the full moon at night, shining through the spidery veins of dust and gas that hang through the nebula like cobwebs.

Consider, Rein says, the spectrum of light that distant astronomers might see if Earth — whose atmosphere is more than 20 % oxygen — had a moon with a methane - rich atmosphere like Saturn's moon Titan.

On those nights, one could contemplate the scene dimensionally: there's the moon, less than two seconds distant at light speed, and behind it the locus of all galactic motion beckons mysteriously, more than a trillion times farther away.

With less than four weeks remaining before NASA's New Horizons spacecraft speeds through the Pluto system for humanity's first - ever close - up reconnaissance of the distant planet and its assortage of moons, speculation runs rampant among scientists and the general public alike about what these mysterious worlds at the outer reaches of the Solar System might look like up close.

The models heavily relied upon by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) had not projected this multidecadal stasis in «global warming»; nor (until trained ex post facto) the fall in TS from 1940 - 1975; nor 50 years» cooling in Antarctica (Doran et al., 2002) and the Arctic (Soon, 2005); nor the absence of ocean warming since 2003 (Lyman et al., 2006; Gouretski & Koltermann, 2007); nor the onset, duration, or intensity of the Madden - Julian intraseasonal oscillation, the Quasi-Biennial Oscillation in the tropical stratosphere, El Nino / La Nina oscillations, the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation, or the Pacific Decadal Oscillation that has recently transited from its warming to its cooling phase (oceanic oscillations which, on their own, may account for all of the observed warmings and coolings over the past half - century: Tsoniset al., 2007); nor the magnitude nor duration of multi-century events such as the Mediaeval Warm Period or the Little Ice Age; nor the cessation since 2000 of the previously - observed growth in atmospheric methane concentration (IPCC, 2007); nor the active 2004 hurricane season; nor the inactive subsequent seasons; nor the UK flooding of 2007 (the Met Office had forecast a summer of prolonged droughts only six weeks previously); nor the solar Grand Maximum of the past 70 years, during which the Sun was more active, for longer, than at almost any similar period in the past 11,400 years (Hathaway, 2004; Solankiet al., 2005); nor the consequent surface «global warming» on Mars, Jupiter, Neptune's largest moon, and even distant Pluto; nor the eerily - continuing 2006 solar minimum; nor the consequent, precipitate decline of ~ 0.8 °C in TS from January 2007 to May 2008 that has canceled out almost all of the observed warming of the 20th century.