Here’s a look at Mars’ north polar ice cap as seen by ESA’s Mars Express orbiter on September 30, 2010, edited by astrophotographer and digital artist Mike Malaska. The original image was taken from an altitude of 6,627 miles above Mars. See how he created this image on his Flickr photostream here, and check out…
March of the Barchans
Shaped like huge shark teeth, barchan sand dunes coat the floor of Herschel Crater in this false-color image from the HiRISE camera aboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. (See the full-sized map-projected image here.) Barchan dunes (pronounced “barkan”) are found in many places on Mars as well as on Earth. They are formed by the pile-up…
Color Cast
Another awesome upload by Gordan Ugarkovic, here’s a color-composite image from Cassini data taken in December 2009 showing a jetting Enceladus lit by “Saturnshine” – reflected diffused sunlight from an off-frame Saturn – and given a Saturn-y coloration at the same time! Icy Enceladus is typically a bright white color, with some grey and…
Multi Moons
I can’t even begin to say how many moons Cassini captured in this raw image, taken yesterday October 6! I see Epimetheus and Janus and Pan and Daphnis (I think) and…Atlas?….and…and……..is that Tethys at the bottom? I’m not sure, but what I do know is that this is a whole lot of moons…
Solving a Martian Mystery
“The Red Planet bleeds. Not blood, but its atmosphere, slowly trickling away to space. The culprit is our sun, which is using its own breath, the solar wind, and its radiation to rob Mars of its air. The crime may have condemned the planet’s surface, once apparently promising for life, to a cold and sterile…
Small Worlds, Big Surprises
Far from being just a jagged hunk of rock tumbling through space, the asteroid Lutetia – visited by the European Space Agency’s Rosetta spacecraft this past July – has been found to be coated with a 2000-foot-thick layer of dust and rocks, visibly softening the edges of craters and ridges on its surface. This layer…
Carnival of Space 172
Wow. It’s been quite an exciting week in astronomy, with the passing of NASA’s much-needed budget proposal, the preparation of the shuttle Discovery for its final flight, China’s successful launch of its second lunar mission just this past Friday… and, of course, the monumental announcement of the discovery of a potentially Earthlike planet…
A Shepherd’s Shadow
Inner shepherd of Saturn’s ropy F-ring, Prometheus casts a long shadow through the ring’s icy haze in this beautifully reworked Cassini image by Gordan Ugarkovic. Discovered by Voyager in 1980 Prometheus completes a tumbling orbit around Saturn every 14.7 hours, regularly dipping into the F-ring in a scalloped path and pulling out streamers of icy…
The Light Fantastic
Holy ice spray! This image, released today, shows a dramatic view of Enceladus with geysers in full force, obtained by Cassini while the sun (behind Enceladus) backlit the geysers and reflected light off Saturn illuminated the face of the moon. There couldn’t be a better lighting setup for a scenario like this! In a word:…
Mercury’s Special Scarps
The 300-mile-long long channel cutting across craters on Mercury in this image from MESSENGER was first identified in October of 2008, giving scientists clues to a geologic history found nowhere else in our solar system. Deep cracks like this, found all over the planet, are thought to be caused by the contraction of Mercury as…
Lunar Hues
Look up at the moon on any clear night and you’ll see a cratered world shining down on you, in some phase of illumination or perhaps even full and round, with a few lighter or darker areas but for the most part all in cool, bright shades of whites and greys. The moon’s real colors…
Spot On
Skillfully reworked by astrophotographer and Unmanned Spaceflight member Björn Jónsson, this section from a Voyager 1 image mosaic shows the Great Red Spot as it appeared in March of 1979 in amazing detail…with sunlight coming from the right side, the sense of the clouds really being three-dimensional and that you’re looking down through layers and…
Lights in the Dark 