On July 29, with ESA’s Rosetta spacecraft in orbital tow, the 2.5-mile (4-kilometer) -long Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko fired its brightest jet yet since Rosetta’s arrival just over a full year ago, on Aug. 6, 2014. Most of the images of 67P showing jets and outgassing activity released over the past few months have been edited to…
Author: Jason Major
Jason is a Rhode Island-based graphic designer, photographer, nature lover, and space exploration fanatic.
Today in 1966: Lunar Orbiter I Launched to Map our Moon
On August 10, 1966, NASA’s Lunar Orbiter I launched from Cape Canaveral aboard an Atlas-Agena D rocket, the flagship spacecraft of a program designed to map the Moon and investigate intended landing sites for the planned Apollo landings, including helping determine the risks from micrometeorite and radiation exposure. Over the course of the next twelve months and five…
No This Is Not an Alien Cave Crab on Mars
I’m in a debunking mood today, probably brought on by the seasonal “double Moon hoax” that raises its oh-so-wrong head every August. (Read more on that nonsense here.) So here’s one more thing to say “NO” to: giant alien cave crabs on Mars. Apparently there’d been some buzz recently in the “space woo” circles online…
Mars Will NOT Be As Big As The Moon In The Night Sky
No, no, no…a thousand times NO: Mars will not become a “second Moon” in the sky on August 27. It won’t this year, it didn’t last year, and it didn’t in the past dozen years since this silly yet strangely perennial cyber-legend (yes I just used the prefix “cyber”) first started circulating on teh interwebz. I don’t know…
The Hammer-Feather Drop: Watch Apollo 15 Commander Dave Scott “Do a Science” on the Moon
On August 2, 1971, at the end of the last EVA of the Apollo 15 mission, Commander David Scott took a few minutes to conduct a classical science experiment in front of the TV camera that had been set up just outside the LM Falcon at the Hadley Rille landing site. Scott, a former Air…
Dawn Finds Similarities Between Ceres and Saturn’s Moons
Around 600 miles wide, covered in craters and cliffs, a composition of rock and water ice… these are descriptions of both several of Saturn’s moons and the dwarf planet Ceres, based on recent observations by NASA’s Dawn spacecraft. New topographical maps show that, in terms of surface features anyway, Ceres shares similarities with Saturn’s icy…
Behold the Hidden Colors of Pluto
This newly-released picture of Pluto isn’t quite what our eyes would perceive… but then our eyes aren’t high-tech scientific imaging sensors like the ones aboard New Horizons! An enhanced-color image made from data acquired by the spacecraft’s LORRI and Ralph cameras on July 13, 2015, this view of Pluto shows the many variations in surface compositions…
NASA Delivers a Brand-New Blue Marble Pic
It’s over halfway through 2015 and perhaps it’s high time for an all-new, updated, knock-your-socks-off “blue marble” photo of our beautiful planet Earth. And so earlier this week NASA delivered just that, courtesy of the high-definition EPIC camera (yes, that’s a real acronym) aboard the DSCOVR spacecraft positioned nearly a million miles away toward the Sun. The…
Another Mountain Range Discovered on Pluto
A new image from New Horizons has emerged, showing a new, smaller mountain range on the southwestern border of Pluto’s “heart” region. The image was captured during the July 14 flyby, during which time the spacecraft passed less than 8,000 miles from the planet’s surface.
This is Our Best Photo of Neil Armstrong on the Moon
Everyone knows that Apollo 11 commander Neil A. Armstrong was the first human to set foot on the Moon (and if you didn’t know, that occurred on July 20, 1969 – yes, it really happened). It was a momentous, history-making event that many (like myself) consider one of the most impressive achievements of humankind. But oddly…
Here’s What We Learned About Pluto Today
Three days after New Horizons‘ flight through the Pluto system and the data is coming in fast and furious (albeit quite highly compressed!), giving scientists a virtual “toy box” of new findings to make about these distant worlds’ exotic nature. On Wednesday we got our first looks at Pluto’s 11,000-foot-high mountains, now informally named Norgay…
Incredible 3D Rendering of Pluto’s Icy Alps
It’s only been a day since we got our first glimpse of Pluto’s mountainous terrain from New Horizons but there’s already a 3D video, created by Mattias Malmer. Of course it’s not comprehensively accurate imagery of the region, since there was only that one perspective image to work from, but it gives a fascinating look…
Lights in the Dark 