Hasta La Gadget!

Illinois’ state government has declared that Pluto is a planet, in an attempt to bypass the International Astronomical Union’s 2006 ruling to reclassify the icy world as a member of the Kuiper belt, Discover reports.

The decree reads as follows: “RESOLVED, BY THE SENATE OF THE NINETY-SIXTH GENERAL ASSEMBLY OF THE STATE OF ILLINOIS, that as Pluto passes overhead through Illinois’ night skies, that it be reestablished with full planetary status, and that March 13, 2009 be declared ‘Pluto Day’ in the State of Illinois in honor of the date its discovery was announced in 1930.”

Apparently this has something to do with the fact that Clyde Tombaugh, the fellow who discovered Pluto in 1930, was born in Illinois. The state government also said something about how Tombaugh is the only American to discover a planet, forgetting the hundreds of planets Americans have since discovered orbiting other stars. Hey, at least Illinois found something to take our minds off of Blagojevich.

NASA announced that its Cassini spacecraft has found within Saturn’s G ring a small moonlet that shows up in photographs as a “faint, moving pinprick” of light. Scientists now believe the moonlet is one of the main sources of the G ring and its single ring arc.

The report said that Cassini imaging scientists studied about 600 days worth of images and found the tiny moonlet embedded within a partial ring. NASA estimates that the moonlet is about a third of a mile across (or about 1700 feet).

“Before Cassini, the G ring was the only dusty ring that was not clearly associated with a known moon, which made it odd,” said Matthew Hedman, a Cassini imaging team associate at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., in a statement. “The discovery of this moonlet, together with other Cassini data, should help us make sense of this previously mysterious ring.”

The discovery brings the total of Saturn’s known moons to over 60. Cassini launched back in 1997, employed two really cool slingshot-like maneuvers around Venus to gain thrust for the long trip, and arrived at Saturn in 2004. It’s been taking photographs and doing science out there ever since. For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit saturn.jpl.nasa.gov.

The odds are high that we’re not alone in the universe. In fact, there may be 100 billion Earth-like planets in the Milky Way, or one for every sun-type star in the galaxy, said Alan Boss, a Carnegie Institution astronomer and author of “The Crowded Universe: The Search for Living Planets,” in a new CNN report.

Based on the number of “super-Earths,” or planets several times the mass of the Earth, but smaller than gas giants such as Jupiter, that have been discovered already among the 330 exoplanets we know of outside the solar system, Boss predicts that any of them that have liquid water could also have life.

“Now that’s not saying that they’re all going to be crawling with intelligent human beings or even dinosaurs,” he said in the article. “But I would suspect that the great majority of them at least will have some sort of primitive life, like bacteria or some of the multicellular creatures that populated our Earth for the first 3 billion years of its existence.”

Soon, NASA will launch the Kepler Mission, which contains a telescope that will study 100,000 stars in the Cygnus-Lyra region of the Milky Way for more than three years, the report said, in an aim to detect small dips in a star’s brightness that could indicate the presence of orbiting planets. The mission is scheduled for launch March 5.

NASA announced at a meeting in Washington that it will continue to pursue sending a mission to Jupiter and its four largest moons, as well as plan another mission to Saturn to visit Titan and Enceladus.

NASA said that the Europa Jupiter System Mission will focus on a Europa Orbiter to explore that icy moon of Jupiter and its subsurface water ocean. Although much of the talk about possible life elsewhere in our solar system centers around Mars, astronomers have long maintained that Europa, one of Jupiter’s four largest moons, could also harbor life. The mission would launch probes in 2020 and followup orbiters in 2026.

The Titan Saturn System Mission, meanwhile, would center around an orbiter, a lander, and a research balloon; its launch date is so far unspecified. In a statement, the agency called the proposed missions “grand endeavors that set the stage for future planetary science research.”

NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover Spirit is doing better this month after a Martian wind blew away some of the dust that has accumulated on its solar panels, increasing their electrical output, according to NASA. Spirit’s daily energy supply has risen by about 30 watt-hours—defined as the amount of energy used to power a 30 watt light bulb for one hour—from 210 watt-hours to 240. The rover uses about 180 watt-hours per day for basic survival and communications, the report said, so the increase doubles the power available for driving and using instruments to perform science.

“We will be able to use this energy to do significantly more driving,” said Colette Lohr, a rover mission manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., in a statement. “Our drives have been averaging about 50 minutes, and energy has usually been the limiting factor. We may be able to increase that to drives of an hour and a half.” Both rovers are still operating on the planet after five years. Spirit was the same rover that experienced a temporary glitch a few weeks ago. (Via Slashdot)