This just in! Cropped and sharpened via high pass slightly by yours truly. More to come! ADDED: Here’s another! Nice lighting here! (I removed some motion blur from this one via Photoshop.) And another (nice resolution here): See more images on the Stardust mission page here. Remember….they’re looking for whatever did this. Could it be…
Tag: comet
First Image of Tempel 1
The first image taken by Stardust-NExT as it approached Tempel 1, the comet’s nucleus in clear view but still rather far away. Luckily the comet was centered in the field of view for all the images, but it will take some time to get to the closer-pass images in the download stack. (The 5 closest-pass…
Tempel of Love
This Valentine’s Day – that’s Monday, guys! – NASA’s Stardust spacecraft will have an out-of-this-world date with a heavenly body: the comet Tempel 1, seen above in an image mosaic taken by the Deep Impact spacecraft nearly six years ago. On July 4, 2005, Deep Impact made a rendezvous with Tempel 1, passing as…
From the LITD Archives: Final Flight
Originally posted on January 6, 2010. A reminder that our solar system is a dynamic place, where gravity is the rule of the game and there’s rarely a prize for second place. On January 3, the European Space Agency’s SOHO solar observatory spacecraft captured images of a comet flying towards the Sun….and then disappearing into…
Spaceballs!
Holy interplanetary snowstorm! This image, a focused (“deconvolved”) view of comet Hartley 2 which was approached by NASA’s EPOXI spacecraft on November 4, shows a swarm of specks surrounding an ice-spraying, boulder-crusted nucleus. Those specks aren’t stars, they’re golfball- to basketball-sized balls of loosely-packed ice particles… a.k.a snowballs! And comet Hartley-2 is literally surrounded by them…
A Smooth Approach to Hartley 2
The video above was created by Daniel Macháček (of UnmannedSpaceflight.com fame) and shows a smoothed-out version of Deep Impact’s (d.b.a. EPOXI) now-world-famous pass of Comet 103P/Hartley 2 on November 4, 2010. Using Squirlz Morph freeware he was able to use five close-up images from the spacecraft and turn them into an animation that portrays a very…
Visiting a Comet
They’re calling it a “peanut with jets”…Comet Hartley 2, discovered 26 years ago by astronomer Malcolm Hartley, received a brief but fascinating visit today by NASA’s EPOXI spacecraft at 10:01 am EDT. Images were received on Earth half an hour later, and I assembled these initial 5 close-ups into the rough animation above. (Click to…
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…
A Salty Tail
Sometimes the line between “planet” and “comet” can get a little blurry…especially in Mercury’s case! This video, taken by NASA’s two-piece STEREO (Solar Terrestrial RElations Observatory) spacecraft – consisting of one unit orbiting the Sun just ahead of the Earth and another behind – shows Mercury over a four-day period, shining brightly in the solar…
Jupiter Impact Video
Hm hm hm…..*poof*…………..is that all you got? 🙂 Here’s a video of yesterday’s impact on Jupiter by whatever object was unfortunate enough to have a run-in with the gigantic planet. This was made by Anthony Wesley, the Australian astronomer who spotted the event as it happened through his custom telescope setup. Keep in mind that…
This Week in Space
The space shuttle Discovery prepares for launch and new discoveries from NASA’s Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer…kamikaze comets, another exoplanet spotted, a closer look at the moons Rhea, Pallene and Phobos, lost spacecraft, an interview with retired astronaut Bernard Harris and lots more in this edition of This Week in Space with Miles O’Brien. Enjoy! Provided…
Fatal Attraction
This video from SOHO spanning several days’ worth of time shows the activity of the Sun’s corona as stellar energy is streamed out into space against a passing background field of stars…and then right in the final moments we see it: the bright trail of a comet as it makes its final journey straight into…
Lights in the Dark 