The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter recently got a glimpse into a previously-imaged pit in a region called Marius Hills. An oblique view combined with angled sunlight gave a peek into what seems to be a lunar cave, or at least some sort of overhang at the bottom of the pit! Previous images were completely dark, illuminating…
Dione’s Wispy Cliffs
First spotted by the Voyager spacecraft thirty years ago, it wasn’t until Cassini that the linear features criscrossing Saturn’s moon Dione known as “wispy lines” were confirmed to be the icy faces of high cliff walls rising hundreds of feet from the moon’s frozen surface. Possibly caused by tectonic activity Dione’s cliff walls shine brightly…
The Sun in STEREO
NASA’s STEREO mission – twin spacecraft orbiting the Sun, one ahead of Earth and the other behind – has reached a milestone in its mission today: both spacecraft are now in position to be able to view the entire Sun at the same time, giving scientists the ability to monitor solar activity on both sides!…
Desert Planet
Can’t see the video below? Click here. Here’s the most recent HiClip – a collection of images from the HiRISE camera aboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, assembled and set to music by the HiRISE imaging team at the University of Arizona. These recent images show some fascinating desert-type terrain across Mars, resembling Earth deserts except…
Getting WISE to asteroids
NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer – WISE – has recently finished a survey of small bodies in our solar system. The survey mission, called NEOWISE (for Near Earth Objects), used WISE’s infrared-imaging capabilities to identify 20 new comets and more than 33,000 main-belt asteroids. WISE also spotted 134 near-Earth objects – asteroids or comets that…
Kepler’s Discovery: New Worlds for the Finding
Can’t see the video below? Click here. Today NASA held a press conference at 1pm EST to present the discovery of over 1,200 exoplanet candidates by the Kepler telescope, an orbiting space observatory that’s been watching a section of the sky near the constellation Cygnus for the past year and a half. (The spacecraft launched…
Mimas and the Rings
Mimas hovers in front of Saturn’s rings in a color image composed from raw Cassini data taken on January 31, 2011. I used data taken with Cassini’s green, infrared and ultraviolet spectral filters to compose this colorized version. Known as the “Death Star” moon, 250-mile (400 km) -wide Mimas’ northern hemisphere is dominated by the 80-mile…
Textured Trojan
First of all, get your mind out of the gutter. 😉 21-mile (35 km) -wide Helene is a “Trojan” moon of the much larger Dione, so called because it orbits Saturn within the path of Dione, 60º ahead of it. (Its little sister Trojan, 3-mile-wide Polydeuces, trails Dione at the rear 60º mark.) The Homeric…
A Sense of “Scale”
Here’s a very cool animation by motion designer Brad Goodspeed, showing what our night sky might look like were some of the other planets in our solar system at the same distance from us as the Moon. (About 240,000 miles / 384,000 km.) Wait for Jupiter to make quite an entrance… While watching the video…
The Search for Alien Earths
Can’t view the video below? Click here. Fifteen years ago we didn’t even know there were other solar systems. Now there’s been over 500 planets discovered orbiting other stars in our galaxy, with new ones added to the list almost weekly. Scientists using the Keck Observatory in Hawaii, NASA’s orbiting Kepler spacecraft and other telescopes…
Beautiful Barchans
Barchan sand dunes in Mars’ Arkhangelsky Crater This image from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter’s HiRISE camera features a barchan dune within the floor of Arkhangelsky Crater on Mars, one of its forward-facing “horns” displaying a sharp, serpentine ridge. The dunes in Arkhangelsky Crater are made of darker-colored material than the surrounding landscape, although the image…
The Feeling’s Mutual
Dione slips behind Rhea in this animation made from 19 raw images taken by the Cassini spacecraft on January 20, 2011. Called a mutual event, the two moons seem to just miss each other – even though in reality they are separated by over 93,400 miles! Rhea and Dione are similar in composition and size,….
Lights in the Dark 