Odysseus and The Dish

Murriyang, the CSIROâ€™s Parkes radio telescope points toward a nearly Full Moon in this image from New South Wales, Australia, planet Earth. Bathed in moonlight, the 64 meter dish is receiving weak radio signals from Odysseus, following the robotic lander's February 22 touch down some 300 kilometers north of the Moon's south pole. The landing of Odysseus represents the first U.S. landing on the Moon since the Apollo 17 mission in 1972. Odysseus' tilted orientation on the lunar surface prevents its high-gain antenna from pointing toward Earth. But the sensitivity of the large, steerable Parkes dish significantly improved the reception of data from the experiments delivered to the lunar surface by the robotic moon lander. Of course the Parkes Radio Telescope dish became famous for its superior lunar television reception during the Apollo 11 mission in 1969, allowing denizens of planet Earth to watch the first moonwalk.

from NASA https://ift.tt/QMJUfiG

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The Observable Universe

How far can you see? Everything you can see, and everything you could possibly see, right now, assuming your eyes could detect all types of radiations around you -- is the observable universe . In light, the farthest we can see comes from the cosmic microwave background , a time 13.8 billion years ago when the universe was opaque like thick fog. Some neutrinos and gravitational waves that surround us come from even farther out, but humanity does not yet have the technology to detect them. The featured image illustrates the observable universe on an increasingly compact scale , with the Earth and Sun at the center surrounded by our Solar System , nearby stars , nearby galaxies , distant galaxies , filaments of early matter , and the cosmic microwave background . Cosmologists typically assume that our observable universe is just the nearby part of a greater entity known as "the universe" where the same physics applies. However, there are several lines of popular but spe...

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