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This Week in Space
The ISS gets a room with a view, Obama gives a shoutout to the Station astronauts while former NASA administrator Michael Griffin contemplates NASA’a future. Also Spirit’s new status, Hubble images, private sector spaceflight, blimp tourism and much more news and discoveries in the latest episode of This Week in Space. Enjoy! This Week in…
A Traveler’s Guide to the Planets on National Geographic Channel
This is a great series airing over the next few nights on the National Geographic Channel…the above is a segment recapping Cassini’s approach to Saturn in 2004. Revisit the excitement of the mission team as they successfully establish orbit and see some of the amazing first images sent back by Cassini. The shows are well-made…
Voyager’s Valentine
On February 14, 1990, after nearly 13 years of traveling the outer solar system the Voyager 1 spacecraft passed the orbit of Pluto and turned its camera around to take a series of photos of the planets. The image above shows those photos, isolated from the original series and labeled left to right, top to…
A WISE Discovery
It’s small and faint and blurry but it’s definitely there… the first comet identified by WISE, NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer. At the center of the image is a fuzzy red dot. This dot is a 1.2-mile-wide ball of water ice and rock dubbed P/2010 B2 (WISE) – or just Comet WISE for short –…
Carnival of Space #140
Welcome! I’m very honored to host the 140th edition of Carnival of Space here on Lights in the Dark, especially considering that this week marks this site’s one-year anniversary! It’s really been a fascinating year for me. I’ve had a lot of fun finding and featuring images from the various missions exploring our solar system…from…
Night Moves
After some delays over the weekend, this morning Endeavour lifted off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, in what was officially the last nighttime launch of the space shuttle. Watch the video of the liftoff and rocket separation below, recorded from NASA TV. The STS-130 mission carries the Tranquillity module to the International Space Station and the…
Fire in the Sky
Around 6pm local time, February 3 2009, a large fireball was seen in the evening skies over Ireland. First video of the blazing meteor can be seen above. Reports are coming in that the “desk-sized” meteor may have landed in a field. It may be a piece of a larger object that exploded in the…
“X” Marks the Spot
With a long trail of material streaming out into space one would assume this to be a photo of a comet…but it’s not. Rather, it’s believed to be the result of a collision between two asteroids that produced a weird X-shaped pattern of filaments emanating from a small remnant object. Material from the filaments has…
Party Like It’s 2012
In light of all the curiosity and theories regarding the most recent world-ending cataclysm anticipated for the year 2012 (seems like there’s a new expiration date every decade or so), I thought I’d post a nicely informative article from the NASA FAQ page from last Friday, November 6. (No time? Bottom line…..regardless of the world’s…
The Results Are In
The data is in from today’s flyby of Enceladus and the images so far have not disappointed! The moon’s characteristic southern jets are running at full power, seen above, backlit by the sun and thereby easily visible to Cassini’s cameras. Below are a couple more images, one of Enceladus’ illuminated icy face with Saturn’s ringplane…
Ring King
 The bright band in this image is a cross-section of a massive new ring discovered around Saturn, a cold, diffuse and incredibly thick band of material orbiting the planet 3.7 million miles out…..much farther out than any of the other rings and farther away even than most of Saturn’s moons. The ring is so…
Lights in the Dark 