A recently uploaded raw image from Cassini, this is a full-frontal view of 318-mile-wide Enceladus taken on November 30, 2010 during the spacecraft’s most recent flyby. Of particular note here is the moon’s heavily grooved and fractured surface, mostly water ice and rock, but strangely split into two sections of differing terrain – most noticeably…
Following a Moon Shadow
Can’t see the video below? Click here. Here’s an intriguing video assembled by Daniel Macháček, made from archived image data from NASA’s Viking 1 orbiter; on September 28, 1977, over a year after dropping a probe onto the Martian surface, the orbiter captured images of the shadow of Mars’ moon Phobos passing over the billowy top…
Ditches, Devils and Dunes
There’s a lot going on in this image from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter’s HiRISE camera…swirling dust devil tracks paint dark streaks over the sand dunes within Russell Crater (click here for a larger view of the region) while long “peculiar” ditches run snakelike down the crater’s sloped walls. Click the image above for a…
Sunny Face
The most recent (7:15 pm CST 12-10-2010) AIA image of the Sun by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory. Looks like a face. 🙂 That is all. Image courtesy SDO (NASA) and the AIA consortium. (Oh, and congrats to the SDO team for their image being chosen as one of LIFE’s pictures of the year! w00tw00t!)
Like Ships in the Night – Akatsuki Sails Right Past Venus
So close, but yet so far. In a poignant farewell, Japan’s Akatsuki spacecraft returned this image of Venus as it sped off into space, its attempt at establishing orbit having failed on Wednesday, December 8. The $300 million scientific observatory was created to study the atmosphere of our neighboring planet, as well as use its…
The Valley So High
This beautiful landscape scene may be reminiscent of sandy deserts on Earth but it’s actually a valley slicing into the frozen ice of Mars’ north pole as seen by NASA’s Mars Odyssey, soon to become the longest-operating spacecraft on or around the red planet. The image above was created from several images taken by Odyssey’s…
Dione and Tethys in Passing
Two of Saturn’s moons pass each other from Cassini’s perspective on December 6, 2010, in this animation compiled from 70 raw image files. This was more an experiment in using iMovie HD to create an animation from a lot of individual images than anything else…I didn’t take the time to clean up the specks and…
Permanent Freeze
No it’s not Pan’s labyrinth, it’s a HiRISE image of a portion of Mars’ south polar ice cap showing frozen mesas made of layers of carbon dioxide ice. During the winter months on Mars – which is considerably colder than Earth – carbon dioxide is deposited as frost in the upper latitudes and evaporates…
Rocky Shadows
Piles of boulders cast long shadows in the floor of the 18.6-mile (30 km) wide Necho crater on our moon. This dramatically-lit image from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC) shows the final result of a large impact on the lunar surface, and gives a nice example of some of the rugged terrain that can…
A Transient Transit
Almost forgotten today in all the excitement over the giant prominence seen by SDO, the Moon also had a small role to play over the weekend: its lunar transit of the Sun in front of SDO’s cameras! Although brief and not captured by all the AIA instruments, AIA 304 did manage to glimpse a peek…
Monster Sun
Everyone’s abuzz about what SDO is watching this morning: a huge solar prominence and filament wrapping partway around the southwestern hemisphere of the Sun, literally hundreds of thousands of miles long! This is a section of the latest image from SDO’s Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA) 304 camera, which best captures details about the sun’s outer…
From the LITD Archives: You Are Here
Here’s an image that always blows my mind: it’s our planet as seen by the exploration rover Spirit on March 8, 2004, 63 Martian days into its mission. It’s the first image of Earth taken from the surface of another planet. The official description says: The image is a mosaic of images taken by the…
Lights in the Dark 