Can’t see the video below? Click here. And away she goes! NASA’s GRAIL spacecraft launched successfully – and beautifully! – at 9:08 am EDT this morning from Cape Canaveral aboard a Delta II Heavy rocket. This was the third day for launch attempts after several scrubs due to high-altitude winds on both Thursday and Friday….
Tag: moon
Juno Looks Back Home
It’s not the famous “pale blue dot” image, but it sure is close: on August 26 the Juno spacecraft turned its JunoCam to take this image of the Earth and the Moon from a distance of about 6 million miles. From that distance, our world is effectively reduced to a bright fuzzy dot, with a smaller,…
High Over Hyperion
The Cassini spacecraft passed by Saturn’s spongy-looking moon Hyperion yesterday, August 25, and returned some very dramatic images like the one seen here – fascinating! At 15,000 miles this was Cassini’s second-closest approach to Hyperion. It will pass by again on September 16 at just over twice that distance. The closest it has come to Hyperion…
Granular Flows in a Copernican Crater
Sometimes flows of material on the Moon are made of light-colored material, sometimes they’re made of dark-colored material. This is definitely an example of the latter! This is a small portion of a Narrow-Angle Camera image taken by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, showing detail of “low-reflectance” granular material sliding down the wall of a crater…
July 31: Birthday for Lunar Images!
On this day in 1964 NASA’s Ranger 7 became the first US spacecraft to capture close-up images of the Moon’s surface. The first image, shown here, was 1,000 times clearer than anything ever previously seen. The spacecraft, launched on July 28, 1964, arrived at the Moon three days later and turned on its cameras 17 minutes…
Pluto’s New Moon
Scientists using the Hubble Space Telescope have identified a new moon in orbit around distant Pluto. Estimated to be between 8 to 21 miles (13 to 31 km) in diameter the moon has been designated P4… at least until a more fitting name can be decided upon. P4 lies between the orbits of Nix and…
More Hope for Life on Enceladus?
Researchers on the Cassini mission team have identified large salt grains in the plumes emanating from Saturn’s icy satellite Enceladus, making an even stronger case for the existence of a salty liquid ocean beneath the moon’s frozen surface.
Moon Noir
Here’s another intriguing look at Helene, lit by sunlight from the right while some reflected light from its own highlands illuminates the interior of a valley/crater. Its dark side appears pitch black against the slightly brighter region of space behind, possibly lightened by the diffuse reflected light from ice particles in Saturn orbit. This is…
A Close Pass of Helene
On June 18, 2011, the Cassini spacecraft performed a flyby of Saturn’s moon Helene. Passing at a distance of 4,330 miles, it was its second-closest pass of the icy little moon.
Big Sisters
Here’s a color-composite image of Rhea and Titan, Saturn’s largest moons. Made from raw images acquired by the Cassini spacecraft on June 16, 2011, this really shows the vast difference in size and appearance of the two moons. Rhea, seen in the foreground, is an icy, airless and heavily-cratered world 950 miles wide. Titan, on…
One Year of Moon
Can’t see the video below? Click here. This awesome animation by the visualization folks at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center shows the phases and position of the Moon throughout 2011 – a full year of the Moon compressed into 2.5 minutes! What’s really interesting is how you can see the wobble of the Moon in…
Bounce and Flow
Dark flows run down the slopes of Stevinus A crater on the Moon in this detail of an image from the LRO’s camera. Large boulders that have rolled downhill appear to have interrupted the flow in at least one spot in this image. It’s still not exactly known whether these features in Stevinus A are…
Lights in the Dark 