Ancient Roman fresco from the villa of P. Fannio Sinistore in Boscoreale, 43-30 BCE.
This extraordinarily well preserved image makes remarkable use of perspective and colour. It is unknown what the function of the orb on the table is, perhaps it is a glass bowl with a butterfly pattern on it.
Courtesy & currently located in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Photo source: Wikipedia Commons
Using advanced Solar Electric Propulsion (SEP) technologies is an essential part of future missions into deep space with larger payloads. The use of robotics and advanced SEP technologies like this concept of an SEP-based spacecraft during NASA mission to find, rendezvous, capture and relocate an asteroid to a stable point in the lunar vicinity offers more mission flexibility than would be possible if a crewed mission went all the way to the asteroid.
NASA’s asteroid initiative, announced as part of the President’s FY2014 budget request, integrates the best of NASA’s science, technology, and human exploration capabilities and draws on the innovation of America’s brightest scientists and engineers. It uses current and developing capabilities to find both large asteroids that pose a hazard to Earth and small asteroids that could be candidates for the initiative, accelerates our technology development activities in high-powered SEP and takes advantage of our hard work on the Space Launch System and Orion spacecraft, helping to keep NASA on target to reach the President’s goal of sending humans to Mars in the 2030s.
A map of the universe by René Descartes from Principia philosophiae, 1644, one of many fascinating depictions in this visual history of mapping the cosmos
