Welcome to Beyond Our Horizons: An Educational Page About Space. We are very glad that you have visited our 1999 Thinkquest entry and hope that you will find it both educational and entertaining. There are applets where you can create your own solar system; land on the moon; or traverse a dangerous asteroid field. There is also a wealth of information about our solar system, gravitation, and humankind's journey into space.

8.12.99     Perseid Meteor Shower to Occur Today

     Today, August 12, 1999, there will be 50 to 150 shooting stars falling from the sky. Tonight the best time to view the annual show is from approximately 2:00 a.m. to dawn. The Perseid Meteors are not the only ones to be seen during the year, but are said to be the most beautiful. If you are not around to see the show, don't worry. NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama sent up a weather balloon to get an unobstructed view of the cosmic performance. Click here to get more detailed information about the Perseids and to see their show from 105,000 feet above Earth.

8.10.99     New Image of Mars Displays an Active Planet

     A recent photo of Mars, taken by the Mars Global Surveyor, gave scientists a much different view of our neighbor in the solar system, changing their previous perceptions about the Red Planet. The Surveyor took a very sharp, high resolution photo of the planet that showed differences on the surface of the planet when compared to the Viking photos from 20 years ago. This new photo depicted the planet with shifting dunes, great wind storms, and poles that change with the seasons. This knowledge has profoundly changed our perception of our neighbor Mars, the 4th planet from the Sun. Click here to get more detailed information about the story.

7.23.99     The Chandra X-Ray Telescope Is Put into Orbit by STS-93

     To the left you can see the Chandra X-Ray telescope being put into orbit by the crew of the STS-93 mission. Over the next week or two, the observatory staff in Cambridge, Massachusettes will do calibration and testing of the new satellite. Later in August, NASA will release the first significant images taken by the telescope. The Chandra takes its place among the large and powerful scopes that NASA uses. Chandra is third in NASA's "Great Observatory" made up of the Hubble Space Telescope, the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory, and now Chandra, the most powerful X-Ray telescope in the world. Click here for more information about Chandra.

     This is an informational section for Beyond Our Horizons. To use this site, simply click on the area of space you would like to explore on the menu at the top of each page. There are instructions for using the applets on each individual applet page. Click below to mail us or to see the sources of our information and photographs for this site.