Here’s a look at the frozen crater Cilix, a rare ice-filled dent in the scoured and resurfaced face of Europa. Taken by the Galileo spacecraft in 1998, this image has been reassembled from raw data and color-calibrated by Gordan Ugarkovic to highlight the surface detail of this fascinating frozen cueball of a moon. Covered by…
Equinox Revisited
Here’s a beautiful color portrait of Saturn taken by Cassini during the planet’s 2009 spring equinox last August. Approximately every fifteen years Saturn is angled so that the light from the sun strikes it straight-on, causing the shadows cast by the rings to appear as a pencil-thin line along its equator. The Cassini spacecraft happened…
Blast from the Past
This photo of Neptune’s largest moon Triton was taken by Voyager 2 on August 24, 1989…nearly 21 years ago! With a resolution of about six miles per pixel it reveals the rugged mountainous terrain of this frozen moon in the far reaches of our solar system, including its signature “cantaloupe terrain” seen here in the…
A Cassini Composition
Cassini took this beautiful image of a crescent-lit Enceladus shadowed against Saturn’s silhouette during Friday’s flyby, demonstrating once again its uncanny ability to capture wonderfully-composed shots that illustrate the inherent beauty of our family of planets. Enceladus is the now-famous moon with “jet-power”…continually erupting geysers spray water ice out into space from long “tiger stripe”…
Auroral Arrhythmia
Just like Earth, Saturn has its own versions of northern (and southern) lights illuminating high-altitude rings around its polar latitudes. Understandably much larger and more powerful than our planet’s auroras, they are nevertheless caused by the same thing: energetic particles streaming out from the sun get caught in Saturn’s magnetic field and are funneled toward…
Moon Quartet
Four of Saturn’s 62 moons are seen passing each other in this animation, composed from 22 raw images taken by the Cassini spacecraft on July 27, 2010. Epimetheus, Prometheus, Janus and tiny Atlas all orbit Saturn within or near the ring system. As the animation begins, the potato-shaped Prometheus is just “rounding the bend” inside…
Pillar of Fire
Ok it’s not fire, it’s plasma, but it’s nevertheless a wonderful image by space photographer Alan Friedman showing a coronal ejection towering over 200,000 miles above the surface of the sun. It was taken on July 27, 2010. Coronal mass ejections (CMEs) occur when particularly large magnetic loops filled with plasma “snap” and expel their…
Face to Face
Remember the old photo of the mysterious “face on Mars” taken by the Viking spacecraft in 1976? Well here’s the same landform, imaged by the HiRISE camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. Just goes to show that things aren’t always what they seem. The surprisingly human-looking “face” was really just a trick of the light…
Shades of Blue
Just some more Saturn beauty. Composite of raw image data in RGB filters from Cassini’s wide-angle camera, taken on July 15, 2010. (Not sure what moon that is.) Have a great weekend! Image: NASA/JPL/SSI. Edited by J. Major.
This Week in Space
Episode 24. Includes: Cool video of new space vehicle tests, Daily Show on NASA boss Charlie Bolden’s Muslim comment, Space Shuttle worker layoffs, last Atlantis shuttle fuel tank, progress we have a problem, and asteroid ready for close up. Provided by SpaceflightNow.com. Can’t view the video above? Watch on YouTube here.
Lutetia in the Limelight
On the night of Saturday, July 10, 2010, ESA’s Rosetta spacecraft passed by the 80-plus-mile-wide asteroid Lutetia at a distance of less than 2000 miles, and retured a series of wonderfully detailed images of this intriguing little member of our solar system. The image above, cropped and rotated 90º, shows Lutetia’s cratered surface, covered with…
An Icy Crescent
A color-composite image of Saturn’s moon Enceladus, assembled from RGB raw image data recorded by Cassini on July 4, 2010. The moon’s heavily textured and highly-reflective icy terrain is nicely accentuated by the low angle of sunlight. The Cassini spacecraft was over 104,000 miles from Enceladus when the images were taken. Image: NASA/JPL/SSI. Edited by…
Lights in the Dark 