Free Republic

The Jovian moon Io as seen by the New Horizons spacecraft. The mission's camera caught a view of one of this moon's volcanos erupting. (NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio) The Large Binocular Telescope (LBT), located on Mount Graham in Arizona and run by the University of Arizona, is part of the next generation of extremely large telescopes (ELTs). With two primary mirrors measuring 8.4 m (~27.5 ft), it has a collecting area slightly greater than that of a 30-meter (98.4 ft) telescope. With their resolution, adaptive optics, and sophisticated instruments, these telescopes are expected to probe deeper...

In... 1970, a Washington gossip columnist found herself seated at a dinner party next to rocket engineer Wernher von Braun. "One of the most fascinating men in the world has just moved to town," she gushed to her readers afterward. "The rocket genius is a brilliant conversationalist, extremely handsome and socially charming." It might seem odd to judge the mastermind of the Apollo program's Saturn V launch vehicle -- and, earlier, the German V-2 -- by his savoir faire. Yet Dr. von Braun's gift for talk and salesmanship, together with his technical skill and managerial prowess, were indispensable to his...