Happy Star Wars Day! Now there’s a holiday I can really get into. 🙂 To celebrate, I felt that it would be appropriate to post about the most Star-Warsy object in our solar system: Saturn’s moon Mimas! Below is a repost from March 29, Now That’s a Moon! Here we go again… This portrait of…
This Week in Space
With Miles O’Brien on vacation, David Waters hosts this episode of This Week in Space highlighting rocket plane racing, the upcoming private-sector SpaceX rocket launch, the Atlantis and Discovery shuttle missions with new antimatter telescope components to be installed aboard the ISS, NASA uses weather satellites to keep an eye on BP’s oily mess in…
Fast Eddy
A huge swirling eddy in Saturn’s northern equatorial bands is visible in this image from Cassini, taken in wavelengths of light sensitive to methane. The planet’s rings are a bright line, illuminated by the sun and casting their shadows onto Saturn’s cloudtops. This image was taken today, April 29. Credit: NASA/JPL/SSI
Two Decades of Discovery
As this weekend marks the 2oth anniversary of the Hubble Space Telescope’s launch, here’s a video from the Hubble team highlighting just a few of the many discoveries the orbiting observatory has made since first opening its – and our – eyes to the universe. Here’s to many more years of Hubble! Read more on…
Showing Some Flare
After weeks of waiting patiently, the first images are finally here! This video shows an arching prominence erupting from the surface of the Sun on March 30, 2010, as seen by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) in beautiful IMAX-quality high resolution. (By the way, AIA stands for Atmospheric Imaging Assembly, one of the three main tools…
Fire in the Sky
New video…lots more angles: Just after 10pm last night a huge meteor lit up the skies over Wisconsin, Illinois, Missouri and several other midwestern states, inciting calls into local police and news stations from thousands of witnesses. The video above shows footage from various locations and cities…some really incredible stuff! It’s incredible how bright it…
Meanwhile, back on Mars…
Opportunity has recently moved away from its latest distraction: a pair of ancient craters in the dust dunes of the Meridiani Plains dubbed “San Antonio”. The rover didn’t stay long though…a couple of days, just enough to take a few photos of the soft-edged, sandy craters. It has since struck out south again over the…
Cassini Captures Saturn’s Lightning
This is a movie from the Cassini imaging team showing gigantic lightning flashes inside a storm cloud on Saturn! Depicting a 16-minute span of time, the movie shows lightning illuminating large, 300-km-diameter areas within the 3,000-km-long cloud. (The “zap zap” sounds were added later to represent the radio signals that were received by Cassini during…
In Living Color
I’ve been playing around with making color versions of images from the Cassini raw image downloads, now that I know what to look for it’s relatively easy to put together a somewhat “natural color” version of the sights around the Saturn system. (The image above was a little trickier, I had to take…
A Wrinkled World
Combined from 3 images taken in red, green and blue filters, this color composite image of Enceladus shows the little moon’s fractured terrain, varying from a heavily cratered north polar region to the corrugated texture of its mid-latitudes to the deep twisted grooves of its famous southern “tiger stripes”, the sources of its ice geysers…
Frozen Cliffs
One of the newest raw images from Cassini’s latest flyby shows the icy terrain of Saturn’s moon Dione, with steep hills, ridges and the bright face of one of the many deep canyons that meander across its surface. Known as “wispy lines”, these canyon walls expose bright water ice (that makes up about a quarter…
Avalanche!
It’s always exciting to catch geologic surface events in action on Mars, reminding us that the red planet isn’t just a museum piece but a very active place! The image above is from the HiRISE camera on the Reconnaissance Orbiter showing dust clouds billowing up nearly 200 feet at the base of an ice cliff…
Lights in the Dark 