Covered with deep, punched-in craters, Saturn’s 168-mile- (270-km-) wide moon Hyperion resembles a sea sponge more than it does a moon. But a moon it is…in fact, Hyperion is the largest irregularly-shaped moon in the solar system. This image, one of the first sent back from Cassini since awakening from its three-week-long “safe mode” following…
Tag: JPL
Saturn’s “Storm Alley”
Dark swirling vortices march along Saturn’s “storm alley” in this section of an image taken by Cassini on May 19, 2008. (It was recently uploaded as a featured image on JPL’s Flickr page.) Storms on Saturn are huge and powerful, with winds blowing many hundreds of miles per hour and often featuring lightning ten thousand…
Back That Thing Up
For those of you who haven’t seen this yet, it’s a very neat animation made from three days’ worth of images from the Opportunity rover as it climbed away from the rim of Victoria crater in late August 2008. The “shaky cam” look gives it a very you-are-there documentary feeling, especially since the height of…
Lady’s Choice
Scientists prove it: a girl knows how to make up her mind. The image above shows the first target object – that football-sized layered rock – autonomously chosen by the Mars rover Opportunity on March 4. Opportunity selected the rock after taking a series of wide-angle panoramic images of the area and using her new…
When the Wind Blows
A huge 800-plus-foot-wide dust devil swirls across the parched plains of Mars in this image from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter’s HiRISE camera. Heading westward when the image was taken, it casts a tall diffuse shadow toward the northeast. This photo is part of a study of the knobby surface texture of the region in the…
Off to Marquette
The rover Opportunity took this false-color photo of another possible stony meteorite dubbed “Marquette Island” on Monday December 7. These objects stand out on the barren sandy plain that Opportunity is currently traveling across on its way to Endeavour Crater and provide interesting targets for investigation. The rover has already used its Rock Abrasion Tool…
Dug In
Since November 17 the Mars Exploration Rover team has been attempting to carefully get Spirit out of the sand trap she’s been stuck in since summer….unfortunately there’s no sign of freedom for the rover yet. The photo above, taken on November 28 with Spirit’s Forward HAZCAM camera, shows one of the major difficulties facing the…
Seeking Shelter
The exploration rover Opportunity has identified what seems to be another ferrous extraplanetary visitor resting on the sands of Meridiani Plains. The 19-inch-long meteorite, shown here, has been dubbed “Shelter Island” by the MER team. Opportunity’s tire tracks are visible in the upper left. Opportunity spent six weeks in September and October investigating “Block Island”,…
A Dusty Sunset
The Spirit rover, still mired in the soft sand, recently took a series of photos showing the sun setting into a dusty Martian sky. I combined the raw images here to create a short animation. Yes, Spirit is still stuck near Home Plate. Its power levels are good but the rover team has not tried…
Around the Block
“Block Island”, the recently-discovered meteorite resting on the Martian sand dunes, is shown here in a false-color raw image by the Opportunity rover. Measuring nearly 2 feet across, it is the largest meteorite found so far by the Mars Exploration Rovers. Its metallic surface, pocked and pitted by erosion and its collision course through the…
The Iron Giant
“It’s big,” said Mars Exploration Rover team member Ray Arvidson. And at approximately the size of a beach ball, about 2 feet wide, it is the largest meteorite fragment found so far on Mars. The Opportunity team spotted the rock, now known as “Block Island”, during the rover’s travels across the dunes of Meridiani Planum….
It Came From Outer Space
The Opportunity rover has come across a two-foot-wide rock sitting on the Martian sands that may very well be a meteorite. The rock, nicknamed “Block Island”, was spotted by the Mars Exploration Rover team on July 18. They had the rover reverse course and drive over to it to get a better look. The image…
Lights in the Dark 