If you’ve been waiting and dreaming for more high-resolution images of Pluto, the stars are now right: there’s a new mosaic from New Horizons out that snakes across the dwarf planet’s rugged (and notably non-Euclidean) surface, displaying many types of fascinating terrain: craters, pits, jumbled ice mounds, and the edges of a large dark region dubbed “Cthulhu” after…
Author: Jason Major
Jason is a Rhode Island-based graphic designer, photographer, nature lover, and space exploration fanatic.
Stop Everything and Look at This Color Pic from Pluto
Yes, stop. Whatever you’re doing (unless it’s open-heart surgery in which case what are you doing online you quack) stop it right now and just look at this. It’s a new version of the high-resolution images of Pluto acquired by New Horizons on July 14, 2015, except here color data was added to create an enhanced-color…
Mission Update: SUCCESS! Akatsuki Is In Orbit Around Venus!
After some tense moments tonight at JAXA HQ, it has been determined that the spacecraft Akatsuki has performed the necessary thruster burn to establish orbit around Venus! Congratulations Akatsuki and JAXA!
These Are Now Our Best Views Yet of Pluto’s Surface
I’ve mentioned before that better and better image data would be arriving on Earth from the New Horizons spacecraft, and these new pictures prove it!
Japan’s AKATSUKI Will Get a Second Chance at Venus Next Week
Note: this is a repost of an article from Feb. 2015 with a couple of updates. If any of you remember it back in Dec. 2010 Japan’s Venus Climate Orbiter spacecraft AKATSUKI (aka Planet-C), after a five and a half month journey through space, failed to enter orbit around Venus due to a faulty thruster nozzle….
Long-Lost Impact Site Found From Apollo 16 Rocket Stage
In April of 1972 the penultimate Apollo mission sent NASA astronauts John Young and Charles Duke to the surface of the Moon, with Ken Mattingly piloting the command module Casper in lunar orbit. After launch on April 16, the Apollo 16 craft and crew completed two orbits of Earth before burning the J-2 engine of the Saturn…
Why Do People Say the Moon is Made of Green Cheese?
So this isn’t about a scientific discovery by any means, but I did do a little bit of online research to discern the origin of the old expression that the Moon is “made of green cheese.” We’ve all heard it, and though I’m pretty sure that nobody has ever actually taken it as a fact (although when it…
What Would it Take to Knock the Moon Out of Orbit?
Whenever there’s news of an asteroid expected to pass closely by Earth (like this one did on Halloween 2015) at least one person will ask “what if it hit the Moon?” — as if that’s a scenario that somehow all of the astronomers around the world who specialize in near-Earth objects failed to take into…
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…
Mars is Tearing its Moon Apart
Phobos, the largest — yet at just 16 miles wide still quite tiny — moon of Mars is getting ripped apart by the gravitational pull of its parent planet… and it bears the scars to show it, scientists have determined. Long parallel grooves that wrap around the surface of Phobos are thought to be stress fractures…
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…
NASA Hits Halloween Asteroid With Radar
On the afternoon of Oct. 31, 2015, Earth was visited by something much creepier than the typical Halloween trick-or-treater: a dark 2,000-foot (600-meter) -wide asteroid that sped silently (because space) by, approaching at its closest only about 1.3 times the distance to the Moon. Designated 2015 TB145, this particular near-Earth object had only just been…
Lights in the Dark 