The Exploration Rover Opportunity, moving steadily across the low dunes of the Meridiani Plains while its sister Spirit is mired in soft sands half a planet away (temporarily we hope!), takes a photo of its eventual destination: the 14-mile-wide crater Endeavour, still several miles away. The mountainous northern rim of the crater is visible…
Month: May 2009
Devil in the Skies
Spirit captures a dust devil in the distance on camera in this image from a few days ago. I colorized it to enhance detail (and make it a little more “Mars-y”) from the original raw file. Dust devils are common this time of year at Spirit’s location. They are cause by warmer air near…
Wave Rider
4.3-mile-wide Daphnis races along its track, the 26-mile-wide Keeler Gap in Saturn’s A ring, stirring up sinuous edge waves in the ring material behind and before it. Not only does the shepherd moon cast a small shadow onto the ring, but so do the crests of the waves it’s creating! It’s a wonderful little…
Trekking to Titan
For any of you who’ve seen the new Star Trek film by director J.J. Abrams, you know what I’m talking about. For those of you who haven’t (yet), there’s a few spoilers here so…read at your own risk 🙂 I’m not the biggest fan of Star Trek, there being so many more people…
Capturing Pan’s Shadow
Cassini took this photo yesterday, May 9th, as 16-mile-wide shepherd moon Pan passed along its path through the Encke Gap. Its shadow falls upon the A ring, pointing toward Saturn. (I colored the image to approximate visible light coloration based on other true-color calibrations. The original raw image can be seen here.) Pan is…
Dividing Line
At some moment between May of 2003 and September of 2007 a cluster of meteorites struck the Martian sands, excavating craters and blasting the rusty dust away to reveal the dark underlying surface layers. Most likely the result of one object that broke up in the thin atmosphere of Mars, its pieces landing near…
Through the Clouds
A background star is caught within Titan’s atmosphere, as seen by Cassini during its May 5 flyby, seemingly trapped between the cloudtops and high haze layer that surrounds the moon. Eventually the star sinks behind the enshrouding clouds, its light eclipsed by the moon. See image at right. These images are raw and uncalibrated….
Congratulations Cassini!
The Cassini mission web site, http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/, was voted Best Science Site in this year’s Peoples Voice Webby awards! A big congrats to the web team – and the entire mission team as well – for the recognition of excellence. I know I cast my vote for the site, as it’s well-made and a daily…
A Hazy Shade of Titan
Cassini looks down onto Titan’s north pole, its camera revealing the high-level atmospheric haze that encircles the 3,200-mile-wide moon. This image was shot in visible violet light on March 27, 2009, using Cassini’s wide-angle camera. The spacecraft was 122,000 miles away from Titan at the time. The sunlit part of Titan is the side that…
Spotlight on the Sun
This month, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory focuses on our solar system’s real superstar: the sun! The video below highlights historical observations of the sun and shows some recent robotic missions that have brought back groundbreaking data about our celestial sovereign. The photo illustration above approximates the comparative size of the sun to our planet Earth….
Painting a Portrait of Mercury
Previously unknown before MESSENGER’s second flyby on October 6, 2008, the Rembrandt Crater is a young impact basin on the surface of Mercury. It is approximately 430 miles wide…large enough to span the distance from Washington, DC to Boston. Of course, “young” is a relative term here; the basin is estimated to be 3.9 billion…
News: JPL Open House LIVE
JPL is hosting their annual Open House Saturday, May 2 and Sunday, May 3! Watch the live chat feed here as a special broadcast event all weekend. From the JPL site: JPL’s annual Open House gives the public an opportunity to meet scientists, watch demos and tour some of the laboratories where the next planetary…
Lights in the Dark 