If you’re a fan of spacecraft selfies captured with planets in the background (yes, it’s a thing) then you can add this to your portfolio of favorites: it’s the bright limb of Venus captured by ESA/JAXA’s BepiColombo spacecraft during a gravity-assist flyby on August 10, 2021 from a distance of 1,573 kilometers/977 miles. This view…
Tag: flyby
Saturn’s Moon Atlas is Literally a Flying Saucer
If you thought Pan resembled a UFO, Atlas is even more saucer-shaped! Slightly larger at about 19 miles across, Saturn’s moon Atlas was passed by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft on April 12, 2017, coming within about 9,000 miles. The images above are a collection of eight from Cassini’s closest approach. Like its smaller sibling Pan, Atlas…
Juno Sends Back Its First Pictures of Jupiter’s North Pole; “Like Nothing We Have Seen Before”
Thanks to NASA’s Juno spacecraft we now have our best views yet of the north pole of our Solar System’s largest planet and they’re “hardly recognizable as Jupiter” according to the mission’s lead scientist!
Cassini Has Made Its Last Pass by Enceladus. Here Are the Pictures.
After nearly eleven and a half years in orbit around Saturn the Cassini spacecraft has made its last-ever targeted flyby of Enceladus, the 320-mile-wide moon of Saturn that has intrigued scientists and the public alike with its active water ice geysers for more than a decade since their discovery. On Saturday Dec. 19, 2015, Cassini performed its E-22…
Pluto Is the New Science Star of the Solar System
Now over four months after the historic and long-awaited flyby of Pluto by New Horizons, planetary scientists have had a steady stream of unprecedented data arriving on Earth from the outwardly-speeding spacecraft. We’ve learned more about Pluto in the past few months than we had over the decades before and the information is still being analyzed…
Soar Over the Surface of Tethys with Cassini
On Nov. 11, 2015, NASA’s Cassini spacecraft passed relatively closely by Saturn’s moon Tethys, one of the ringed planet’s larger icy satellites. The animation above was made from 29 raw images acquired with Cassini’s narrow-angle camera as it passed by; you can see part of the incredibly cratered and ancient surface of this 662 mile (1,065 km) wide…
Pics Are In from Cassini’s Flyby Through Enceladus’ Plumes!
On Wed. Oct. 28 Cassini performed its lowest-altitude dive yet through the icy plumes of Enceladus, coming just 30 miles from the moon’s surface — that’s only about 6 times higher than a commercial airliner at cruising altitude. But, traveling over 19,000 mph relative to Enceladus (which is 38 times faster than a jet plane!) the pass was…
Cassini Bids Farewell to Dione with Some Fantastic Final Views
NASA’s venerable Cassini spacecraft may still have another two years left in its exploration of the Saturn system but on Monday, August 17, it had its final intimate visit with Dione, one of Saturn’s largest natural satellites at nearly 700 miles (1,126 km) across. On that day Cassini passed within 300 miles (480 km) of Dione at 2:33 p.m. EDT (18:33…
Pluto’s Ice Mountains Revealed in Stunning Detail
At 3 p.m. EDT today, July 15 2015, from the Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, the New Horizons team revealed to the world the first high-resolution image acquired of the surface of Pluto. This was obtained during the historic July 14 flyby with New Horizons’ “Ralph” camera, and it’s our very first close-up view of…
Pluto: Prelude to a Flyby
This is ‪‎Pluto‬, imaged by New Horizons’ LORRI camera on July 12. It’s (once again) the best view yet, captured from a distance of 2.5 million km / 1.5 million miles. Check out all that geology – craters, depressions, chaos terrain of some sort… at no time in human history has anyone ever seen this world in…
Here’s Pluto Like You’ve Never Seen It Before!
…no, really. There hasn’t been an image this detailed of Pluto and its moon Charon in pretty much EVER. (Which makes total sense since New Horizons is the FIRST spacecraft to visit it and it has less than a week and .05 AU Â to go until its closest pass!) So actually everything you’ll see of…
Are You Ready For Pluto?
New Horizons sure is! With just over two weeks to go before the first-ever (and I repeat: EVER!) visit to Pluto and its family of moons the excitement has really ramped up exponentially, especially considering the increasingly detailed views of Pluto and Charon that the spacecraft has been capturing on approach. No longer just a…
Lights in the Dark 