The shadow of Saturn’s rings is reduced to a thin sliver running across the face of the planet in the upper part of this image taken on August 12, one day after its spring equinox. The rings appear dark in this image, since the sunlight is striking them edge-on and Cassini’s cameras are set so…
The Ghost and the Darkness
A spectral figure casts a long shadow as it travels along the path of Saturn’s F ring on August 7, 2009 in this image from the Cassini orbiter. Not a ghost per se but rather a clump of ring material, pulled upwards from the rest of the ring plane by what is perhaps a small…
Around the Block
“Block Island”, the recently-discovered meteorite resting on the Martian sand dunes, is shown here in a false-color raw image by the Opportunity rover. Measuring nearly 2 feet across, it is the largest meteorite found so far by the Mars Exploration Rovers. Its metallic surface, pocked and pitted by erosion and its collision course through the…
The Iron Giant
“It’s big,” said Mars Exploration Rover team member Ray Arvidson. And at approximately the size of a beach ball, about 2 feet wide, it is the largest meteorite fragment found so far on Mars. The Opportunity team spotted the rock, now known as “Block Island”, during the rover’s travels across the dunes of Meridiani Planum….
A Look Back Home
This image shows the Earth as seen by NASA’s Moon Mineralogy Mapper aboard the Chandrayaan-1 orbiter, India’s first lunar scientific satellite. Earth’s colors appear as super-saturated blue, green and white through the mapper’s eye, which is designed to analyze the composition of the moon’s surface and help look for possible water resources for use by…
It Came From Outer Space
The Opportunity rover has come across a two-foot-wide rock sitting on the Martian sands that may very well be a meteorite. The rock, nicknamed “Block Island”, was spotted by the Mars Exploration Rover team on July 18. They had the rover reverse course and drive over to it to get a better look. The image…
A Giant Among Moons
The largest of Jupiter’s 63 known moons and the largest moon in our solar system, Ganymede has twice the mass of our own moon and is even larger than the planet Mercury. Its surface is marked by dark regions which are  full of craters and lighter areas lined with ridges. This image was taken by…
Pluto Reinstated?
Will Pluto be reissued its former status as a full-fledged planet? While it won’t necessarily be a topic of debate at next week’s meeting of the International Astronomical Union – the group in charge of, amongst other things, the official naming of all things extraterrestrial and thus the group responsible for voting Pluto off the…
Blast Zone
The Hubble Space Telescope trained its newly-installed Wide Field Camera 3 on Jupiter, capturing a photo of the recent impact scar made on July 19. This image is the first taken by the new camera installed in May, and while it’s still uncalibrated, details can be seen of the dark debris plume that has spread…
The Ring
No, it’s not the final frame of a haunted videotape…it’s a backlit Titan, silhouetted against the sun, photographed by Cassini from over 850,000 miles away. Titan’s upper-level atmospheric haze is illuminated in this image, surrounding the moon high above the cloudtops. The haze is a mixture of complex hydrocarbons created by the breakdown of methane…
It’s a Small World
Another wonderful image from the Apollo Image Gallery, this scanned film image shows the ascent stage of the Eagle lander as photographed by Neil Armstrong, with the partially-lit Earth floating in the black lunar sky above. This is how our world looks from 239,000 miles away. Basically it would look 4 times larger than the…
Taking a Hit
Between the hours of 6am and noon EDT on Monday, July 20, something smashed into Jupiter, the largest planet in our solar system. And here’s the scar to prove it. First noticed as a dark blotch by amateur astronomer Anthony Wesley, monitoring the giant planet via telescope from Australia, the impact was soon confirmed via…
Lights in the Dark 