America’s newest next-generation Earth observing weather satellite, NOAA’s GOES-16, has returned its first high-definition images of Earth—one of which even includes the Moon!
Author: Jason Major
Jason is a Rhode Island-based graphic designer, photographer, nature lover, and space exploration fanatic.
First Flight of the Lunar Module, 49 Years Ago Today
49 years ago today, at 5:48 p.m. on Jan. 22, 1968, a stocky Saturn IB roared into the sky from Pad 37B at Kennedy Space Center taking the Lunar Module on its first flight into space. The uncrewed Apollo 5 mission would put LM-1 through a series of tests in low-Earth orbit, making sure that…
Behold the Most Distant Crescent Moon
At first glance this pixelated picture may not look all that spectacular, but it gains a whole new meaning when you realize what it’s actually showing: a look at the most distant crescent moon ever seen! But this isn’t Earth’s moon; it’s Charon, Pluto’s largest companion, lit by the light from a Sun 3.2 billion miles away—some…
Galactic Collisions Meet Supermassive Black Holes in This Deep Space Image
Observations from some of the world’s most powerful telescopes—NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope (GMRT) in India, the National Science Foundation’s Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array in New Mexico, and Japan’s Subaru Telescope in Hawai’i have been combined to create an image of two incredibly powerful cosmic forces colliding, two billion light-years away. Hot gas…
SOFIA Observations of Ceres Show You Can’t Judge an Asteroid by Its Cover(ing)
The dwarf planet Ceres, at 587 miles wide the largest object in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, has a different surface composition than previously thought—and it took NASA and DLR’s Boeing 747-based SOFIA observatory to make the distinction. By observing Ceres in mid-infrared, only possible from high altitudes above infrared-absorbing water vapor, SOFIA found that…
Cassini Has Just Taken the Best Picture of Daphnis Yet!
Hello, Daphnis! On January 16, 2017, the Cassini spacecraft captured the best photo yet of Daphnis, a 5-mile-wide shepherd moon that orbits Saturn inside the Keeler Gap at the outermost edge of the A ring (and also just so happens to be my personal favorite moon of Saturn!) The raw image arrived on Earth today, and…
ESO Turns its ALMA Eyes on the Sun
The European Southern Observatory has begun imaging the Sun for the first time, using its Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA)—a suite of large dish-type telescopes located on a plateau 16,000 feet above sea level in the arid Chilean Andes. ALMA’s capabilities to observe in millimeter and submillimeter wavelengths allow imaging of the Sun’s dynamic chromosphere and…
This Star in Our Galaxy is Almost as Old as the Entire Universe
Like anything else, stars have life spans. They are born (from collapsing clouds of interstellar dust), they go through a long main phase where they fuse various elements in their cores, and eventually they die when they run out of fuel. The finer details of these steps are based on what the star is made of, how…
This is Jupiter Seen from Mars
The HiRISE camera aboard NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) is specifically designed to take super high-resolution images of the surface of Mars but it also does a pretty darn good job capturing pictures of other objects too—like Jupiter and its Galilean moons, several hundred million miles away! The image above was captured in extended color (i.e. it…
Gene Cernan, the “Last Man on the Moon,” Has Died at 82
Sad news today: Eugene A. Cernan, former NASA astronaut and one of the twelve people who walked on the Moon during the Apollo program, died today at the age of 82. “It is with very deep sadness that we share the loss of our beloved husband and father,” Cernan’s family said in a news release…
SpaceX Nails Another Landing at Sea—This Time in the Pacific!
Today, January 14, 2017, SpaceX achieved another commercial launch success with the delivery of ten Iridium satellites to orbit—the first of 70 that will comprise the next generation IridiumNext constellation—as well as a new milestone in its ongoing trek toward reusable launch capability: the first successful landing of a Falcon 9 first-stage booster on…
Friday Fun: Plop Plop, Fizz Fizz…in Zero-G
During his 340-day-long One-Year Mission in 2015-2016 NASA astronaut Scott Kelly conducted—and was the subject of—countless experiments on the effects of long-duration space travel aboard the ISS. But he did manage to have a little fun too; the video above shows what happens to a blob of water free-floating in microgravity (that’s the technical term for…
Lights in the Dark 