The Solar System Is Where It's At

Something rather extraordinary has been discovered. On Wednesday the 7th of October a huge new ring around Saturn was discovered. It is located about 8 million miles from the planet, some 50 times further than Saturn's other rings, and it lies in a different plane. The ring is so huge that it is 3 million miles wide. The ring is invisible to the telescopes as well as the naked eye, but if it were visible, the ring would appear twice the size of the full moon in the night sky. It is thought that the ring was formed by dust being thrown up from Saturn's moon Phoebe after small impacts and the dust gravitates towards the planet where it is then picked up by Iapetus.
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The theme of today's post is space and the Solar System, so I shall keep in line with that. NASA have sent a rocket segment smashing into the moon's south polar region in order to lift some dust from the surface, and a probe is to follow right after, hoping to pick up and detect water molecules which are expected to be in the lunar craters, hidden in the permanently dark corners of the craters. If the probe is successful in detecting water, it could pave the way for future plans for long term stays by astronauts on the surface of the moon. The up thrown dust was expected to reach altitudes of several miles but failed to reach even close to this, possibly due to more solid material below the lunar surface, however the analysis of the dust continues.
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Russian space research institute, IKI, based in Moscow hosted an international conference aimed at luring scientists from Europe and possibly other countries such as the US into an ambitious project to send a craft to the surface of Venus, officially scheduled for launch in 2016. The idea of the conference was to determine what approaches would be best suited to getting the craft through the dense acidic atmosphere of Venus in an attempt to explore the planets surface.
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