Here’s a great view of Santa Maria crater made from a couple of raw images from the Opportunity rover, taken earlier this month and assembled by Stu Atkinson. (I did take the liberty of cropping the original image a bit and filling in some of the sky at upper right.) I particularly like the texture…
Tag: crater
A Close Pass
Here’s a close-up look at the extensively-cratered surface of Rhea, Saturn’s second-largest moon, captured by Cassini as it performed its closest flyby yet on the morning of January 11, 2010. Passing a mere 43 miles (69 km) over the surface, Cassini got a great look at some of the deep craters that literally cover the…
At Crater’s Edge
Here’s a fantastic look at an inner wall of Santa Maria crater on Mars, the latest stop for the rover Opportunity on its travels across the Meridiani plain. Colorized by Stuart Atkinson for his Opportunity-dedicated blog The Road to Endeavour, this is a section of a larger panoramic image showing the crater’s rim and jumbled…
On the Edge of Santa Maria
Opportunity has finally made it to the edge of her latest observation target: the crater named “Santa Maria”!
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…
Where the Sun Don’t Shine
There are places surprisingly close by that are the coldest known spots in the entire solar system: on our Moon’s south pole lie deep craters that never receive direct sunlight, in fact have never seen the Sun, and within these craters lie pockets of ice that contain the same frozen material they’ve had since forming…
Mercury’s Ancient Scar
One of the largest craters discovered in our solar system, Mercury’s Caloris basin measures in at over 963 miles (1550 km) wide…easily big enough to contain the state of Texas or all of the Great Lakes! This mosaic image shows the huge crater in its entirety – it’s the light-toned region that dominates the central part…
It’s All Downhill
This image from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter shows a close-up of an 80-foot-wide boulder on the central peak of Gassendi Crater, a trail left behind it in the dark lunar soil. There’s even a bit of a pile-up of soil in front of it where it came to rest! Several smaller boulders on either side…
Peak Time
A crater’s central peak casts a long shadow in this image from Cassini, taken on October 17 as the spacecraft passed by Dione at a distance of 25,000 miles. 700-mile-wide Dione is literally covered in craters, faults and gouges, a testament to the ancient age of its frozen terrain. Many larger craters – like the…
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…
Some Craters are the Pits
Look inside a 300-foot-deep pit on the Moon
Crater in Chaos
Here’s an intriguing image of a dune-filled crater on the edge of a plateau on Mars, taken by the HiRISE camera aboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter on April 27, 2010. The heavily-eroded face of the plateau is the result of millennia of wind erosion, which most likely provided the source of the material which has…
Lights in the Dark 