This is from a post I originally published in 2010. I’ll keep trotting it out until it’s not cool anymore. (Which I don’t think will ever happen.) On February 14, 1990, after nearly 13 years of traveling the solar system, the Voyager 1 spacecraft passed the orbit of Pluto and turned its camera around to…
Tag: Jupiter
Eppur Si Muove: Galileo’s Big Night
404 years ago tonight, January 7, 1610, the Pisan astronomer Galileo Galilei looked up at a bright Jupiter at opposition through his handmade telescope and saw three little “stars” next to it, which piqued his natural scientific curiosity. He soon realized that these little objects weren’t stars at all but rather moons that orbited the…
The Brightest Lights: 12 Awesome Space Stories of 2013
What a year for space exploration! With 2013 coming to a close I thought I would look back on some of the biggest news in space that I’ve featured here on Lights in the Dark. Rather than a “top ten” list, as is common with these year-end reviews, I’m going to do more of a…
Jupiter’s Moon Europa Has Jets Like Enceladus!
“Attempt no landings there?” Ok, FINE. We’ll just fly a spacecraft through Europa’s newly-discovered plumes and get a taste of its underground ocean that way! Because it has them, and so we could. This was the big news from NASA, ESA, and Hubble researchers today: Jupiter’s ice-covered moon Europa (yes, the one from 2010) has…
“Take Us Home, Scotty…” Juno Takes the First Video of Earth and Moon From Space
If this doesn’t tug at your heart’s space strings, I don’t know what will. What we’re seeing here is a video made from images captured by NASA’s Juno spacecraft as it flew past Earth on October 9, 2013. This is the first second time* a video has been made of the Moon orbiting our planet from…
This is Earth From Juno
Last Wednesday, Oct. 9, 2013, NASA’s Juno spacecraft made a slingshot pass of Earth in order to get the necessary speed boost to reach Jupiter in 2016. As it came within 347 miles of our planet’s surface, passing closest over the southern Atlantic at 3:21 p.m. EDT, it used its JunoCam (developed by the San…
Hubble Spots Jupiter’s Spooky Northern Lights
Acquired in March 2007, this eerie image from Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys’s ultraviolet camera show glowing auroral emissions, always present in Jupiter’s polar regions. The aurora is hundreds of kilometers wide and about 250 kilometers above the planet. It is caused by electrically charged particles striking atoms in the upper atmosphere from above, the…
Two New Moons For Jupiter
Jupiter is our solar system’s resident behemoth. It’s an enormous planet that has more mass than all the others combined, not to mention the largest gravitational and magnetic influence in the solar system (besides the Sun, of coourse.) It’s no wonder that it also has the most moons in orbit around it than any of…
Evidence of Lakes Beneath Europa’s Ice
New research on Jupiter’s ice-covered moon Europa indicates the presence of a subsurface lake buried beneath frozen mounds of huge jumbled chunks of ice. While it has long been believed that Europa’s ice lies atop a deep underground ocean, these new findings support the possibility of large pockets of liquid water being much closer to…
Juno Launches!
(Can’t see the video below? Click here.) Today, at 12:25 pm EDT, an Atlas V 551 rocket took off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Base with the Juno spacecraft aboard, headed for the planet Jupiter. And I was there, along with 149 other “space tweeps”, watching from the press site at Kennedy Space Center. It…
Juno where I’ll be next week?
…at the launch of NASA’s Juno spacecraft, that’s where! 🙂 NASA is holding yet another Tweetup event at Kennedy Space Center next week, focusing on the launch of the long-awaited Juno mission to Jupiter. Even before I left for the Tweetup for the Atlantis flight I had put my name in the hat for the…
Jupiter: Guardian of the Solar System
Can’t see the video below? Click here. Here’s a great presentation made for the NOAA and NASA Goddard Spaceflight Center about the giant planet Jupiter, part of the Science of a Sphere series. It shows the size and power of the huge gas planet and how it dominates its region of the solar system. Indeed,…
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