A recent photo taken by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC) shows a young impact crater in amazing detail, its half-mile-wide interior littered with fused piles of melted rock and encircled by a spray of dark streamers – the “splash” of melted subsurface material from the impact. Boulders and smaller chunks of rock are scattered…
Astro-Art
I can’t repost the images here, because they are copyrighted by the artist, but be sure to check out this series of photographs by renowned photographer Michael Soluri featuring many of the specialized tools used by astronauts on various missions. Beautiful photographs of intriguing instruments, some strange, others very close to what one might find…
Shadow Play
A series of images from Cassini shows the 110-mile-wide Janus passing through shadows cast by Saturn’s rings. Janus shares its orbit within the ring system with sister moon Epimetheus. Both are small, rocky worlds…irregularly-shaped clusters of rubble pockmarked by ancient craters and displaying lots of scrapes and gouges, evidence of glancing blows by larger bodies.
A Dusty Sunset
The Spirit rover, still mired in the soft sand, recently took a series of photos showing the sun setting into a dusty Martian sky. I combined the raw images here to create a short animation. Yes, Spirit is still stuck near Home Plate. Its power levels are good but the rover team has not tried…
Around the Track
Shepherd moons Prometheus and Daphnis race around Saturn’s rings within their respective gaps, affecting the ring material in their own distinct ways. Prometheus, on the left side, pulls the bright, ropy F ring into streamers while tiny Daphnis, embedded in the 25-mile-wide Keeler gap at lower center, sends up a mound of darker A ring…
Smooth as Glass
The dark spot in the middle of this image is Ontario Lacus, possibly a shallow lake filled with liquid methane located near the south pole of Titan, imaged with synthetic-aperture radar by Cassini. Ontario Lacus on Titan covers about 5,800 square miles in area—about four-fifths the size of Lake Ontario here on Earth.
Worlds Great and Small
A wonderful raw image from the Cassini spacecraft showing a crescent-lit Saturn and one of its 61 known moons. Honestly I’m not sure which moon this is. Could be Tethys, could be Titan, it’s hard to make out in this wide-angle view. Also in crescent, its night side is dimly lit by reflected “Saturnshine”. Cassini…
Martian Lomography
Although not particularly exciting in theme, I like this image a lot for its light and shadow composition. Taken on June 23 by the Spirit rover, this false-color view of the surrounding ground is nicely lit by a setting sun that also creates a glare in the lens. It’s not unlike photos I sometimes get…
All About Abedin
This image from the MESSENGER spacecraft shows the crater Abedin, recently named after Bangladeshi painter Zainul Abedin. The 68-mile-wide crater exhibits a central peak structure and is surrounded by lines of smaller craters, most likely caused by the ejected debris from the initial impact. Most of the features on Mercury have been named after the…
Rings in Relief
This wide-angle view from Cassini, taken on August 16 (2009), shows an amazing amount of relief across the surface of Saturn’s A ring as well as a long shadow cast by the wake of the shepherd moon Daphnis within the Keeler gap. 4.3-mile-wide Daphnis, almost too small to be seen here, sculpts the edges of…
Revisiting Victoria
The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter captured this image of Victoria Crater on July 18, 2009, with the onboard HiRISE high-definition camera. Victoria Crater was the site of the Opportunity rover’s 2006-2007 investigation. Craters like these are great targets for the rover team because the exposed rock along their edges offers valuable information about Mars’ geologic history….
Hello From Earth!
Send a shout-out to a neighboring star system! This is what Australia’s COSMOS Magazine is letting anyone who’s interested do – from all over the world – in celebration of the country’s National Science Week. Their target: a planet called Gliese 581d, a so-called “super-Earth” orbiting a small red dwarf star just over 20 light-years…
Lights in the Dark 