The largest storm in the solar system, Jupiter’s famous Great Red Spot, is a monstrous 15,000-mile-wide hurricane that’s been swirling in the giant planet’s mid-lower latitudes for at least 300 years. It’s believed that the storm’s colors are caused by the different elements within Jupiter’s upper atmosphere… ammonia, methane, water, hydrocarbons and other chemicals that create a…
When the Wind Blows
A huge 800-plus-foot-wide dust devil swirls across the parched plains of Mars in this image from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter’s HiRISE camera. Heading westward when the image was taken, it casts a tall diffuse shadow toward the northeast. This photo is part of a study of the knobby surface texture of the region in the…
Just Passing By
It’s been a while since I posted one of these…it’s an animation made up of 16 raw images from the Cassini spacecraft, taken on March 12, showing Saturn’s moons Dione and Titan passing each other. The small, cratered and frozen Dione couldn’t be more different than her much larger, haze-enshrouded sister Titan, but we’re reminded…
Alone in the Universe
What’s it like to step through the hatch of a space shuttle and look out into the universe? The reality of it is deceptively incomprehensible to most, but Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield gives an amazing first-person description of his spacewalk experience to Universe Today’s Nancy Atkinson in this article. Check it out, he really stirs…
This Week in Space
The new IMAX: Hubble 3D astronaut stars and launch party at the Air and Space Museum in DC takes center stage in this edition of This Week in Space with Miles O’Brien. Also, the president prepares to support his new plans for NASA and the shuttle mission may get a stay of execution (as long…
Heeeere’s Phobos!
After much anticipation, this just in: an amazingly detailed image from the March 7 flyby of Phobos! As Phil Plait might say, click to emphobosize. 😉 See more info and a couple more similar images on the ESA’s Mars Express site. Phobos sure has an interesting surface texture. It’s almost as if boulders have been…
Fatal Attraction
This video from SOHO spanning several days’ worth of time shows the activity of the Sun’s corona as stellar energy is streamed out into space against a passing background field of stars…and then right in the final moments we see it: the bright trail of a comet as it makes its final journey straight into…
The Tao of Iapetus
With a leading side dark as charcoal and trailing side bright white, the 914-mile-wide Iapetus is literally the yin-and-yang of Saturn’s family of moons. The color variation on Iapetus is due to the fine coating of dark material that falls onto its leading hemisphere, possibly sent its way by smaller, distant Phoebe traveling within the…
Flight Over Candor Chasma
If you could climb into a helicopter and fly over a valley on Mars, what would it look like? Well (regardless of the fact that a helicopter probably wouldn’t work very well in the thin Martian air) it would probably be a lot like this – a beautiful animation sequence created by Adrian Lark showing…
A Pack of Spokes
Typically, spokes in Saturn’s rings – temporary, shifting bands of material that transect the rings lengthwise – appear as bright streaks when seen from high phase angles but they show up here as subtle dark bands in this low-angle image from Cassini, taken January 27. Some of the brighter rings on the right half of…
Holy Dione
The heavily creased and cratered face of 700-mile-wide Dione is partially lit by the Sun in this image from Cassini, taken on March 4. Some of the moon’s characteristic “wispy lines” can be seen along its sunlit limb…these are the bright, exposed walls of icy canyons caused by ancient tectonic activity. The darker surface material…
This Week in Space
Buzz muses on the next steps for NASA (and his upcoming stint on “Dancing with the Stars”), the Space Coast braces for lay-offs, new proof of lunar ice, Discovery heads (slowly) to the launch pad, Mars’s potentially-hollow moon Phobos gets a close-up, revisiting a comet, windy black holes, blue marbles, icebergs and more on this…
Lights in the Dark 