We could be calling it Cloudgate—”leaked” information from internal emails identifying structures in Pluto’s already hazy atmosphere that could very well be clouds, based on a March 4 article in New Scientist. The image above shows sections of a New Horizons image attached to an email sent by SwRI scientist John Spencer, in which he noted particularly…
Author: Jason Major
Jason is a Rhode Island-based graphic designer, photographer, nature lover, and space exploration fanatic.
Europe’s Sentinel-3A Returns Gorgeous “First Light” Earth Images
Captured by the EU’s Copernicus Sentinel-3A satellite on Feb. 29, 2016, this beautiful composition of blacks, purples, and blues shows the twilight transition across the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard, located north of the Arctic Circle between Norway and the North Pole. The snow-covered and fjord-cut large island of Spitsbergen can be seen at the right edge, while sea ice…
NASA Astronaut Returns to Earth After Historic “Year in Space”
With a smile and an energetic thumbs-up, NASA astronaut Scott Kelly exited the Soyuz TMA-18M capsule shortly after landing on the remote steppe of Kazakhstan at 10:26 p.m. Central time March 1, 2016. It was the return of the Expedition 46 crew, which included Russian cosmonauts Sergey Volkov and Mikhail Kornienko, the latter of whom shared…
Apollo 10’s “Outer-Space-Type Music” Explained
There’s been some buzz recently (no pun intended, Mr. Aldrin) concerning supposed “space music” heard by Apollo 10 astronauts while they were traveling around the far side of the Moon in May of 1969. This is in no small part due to the season three opener of NASA’s Unexplained Files* on the Science Channel, which aired on…
Goodnight, Sweet Philae: ESA’s Comet Lander Likely in Permanent Hibernation
ESA’s Philae lander, the first spacecraft to successfully soft-land on the surface of a comet and former piggyback partner to Rosetta, has not been in communication since July of 2015. With 67P now six months past perihelion and heading deeper out into the Solar System and Rosetta’s mission coming to a close this year, it’s…
Pale Blue Dot: Our Valentine from Voyager 1
If you’re in love with space exploration then you’ll fall for this: a picture of Earth (and five other planets) taken from the Voyager 1 spacecraft after it passed the orbit of Pluto in 1990, 26 years ago today. That image of our planet from almost 4 billion miles away inspired Carl Sagan to write his…
SDO Enters Its Seventh Year Observing Our Sun
Happy Launchiversary SDO! NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory lifted off aboard an Atlas V rocket from Cape Canaveral on Feb. 11, 2010, and has been observing our home star in high-definition ever since. SDO has provided us with unprecedented views of the Sun’s ever-changing atmosphere and data on the space weather it creates over the course of…
Scientists Prove It’s Still Einstein’s Universe and We’re All Just Living In It
In what has truly turned out to be a momentous occasion in astrophysics, today scientists announced the first-ever direct observation of gravitational waves by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) experiment, which consists of two enormous detector facilities located in Louisiana and Washington state and an international consortium of thousands of researchers. First predicted by Albert Einstein in…
Why Are Pluto’s Moons So Weird?
Whether you call it a planet, a dwarf planet, or a Kuiper Belt or Trans-Neptunian Object—or all of the above—there’s no denying that Pluto and its family of moons are true curiosities in the Solar System. Not only does little Pluto have one moon, Charon, that’s so massive in comparison that they both orbit each other…
Another Moonwalker Gone: Apollo 14 Astronaut Ed Mitchell Has Died at 85
The world has lost one of its special treasures: retired Navy captain and former NASA astronaut Edgar D. Mitchell, LM pilot for Apollo 14 and one of the 12 men who walked on the Moon, died on the evening of Thursday, Feb. 4, 2016 at the age of 85. His passing brings the number of…
It’s Been 50 Years Since We First Got Pictures From the Moon
What a difference half a century makes! This week marks 50 years since the Soviet Luna 9 spacecraft made humanity’s first-ever soft landing on the surface of the Moon. Launched from Baikonur on Jan. 31, 1966, the Luna 9 lander touched down within Oceanus Procellarum at 18:44:52 UTC on Feb. 3. Over the following three days Luna 9 sent us our first views of…
There’s More Water Ice on Pluto Than First Thought
When New Horizons made its close pass pf Pluto on July 14, 2015, it did much more than just take pretty pictures; it was also scanning the planet with a suite of science instruments designed to determine the nature of its surface, atmosphere, composition, and other key characteristics. One of these instruments was the Linear Etalon Imaging…
Lights in the Dark 