Blog Archives
Surprise! Jupiter’s Poles are Literally Encircled by Cyclones
Infrared composite of cyclones over and around Jupiter’s north pole. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/ASI/INAF/JIRAM
If you think that Saturn’s polar storm systems are amazing then you’re gonna love this: Jupiter has them too, and not just a single central storm over each of its poles either. NASA’s Juno mission has revealed that Jupiter has not only polar vortices but also a ring of enormous cyclones spinning in formation around both of its poles—five around its south pole and a whopping eight around its northern one! Each of these cyclones is gargantuan in its own right, easily big enough to span the Atlantic Ocean, and somehow they all manage to avoid merging with their respective neighbors via some as-yet unknown process. It’s literally like nothing found anywhere else in the Solar System!
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Our First Close-up Images of Mars From Space Were Hand-Colored with Crayons. True Story.
Hand-colored data from Mariner 4, the “first TV image of Mars,” captured on July 15, 1965. Via Dan Goods.
In November 1964 NASA launched Mariner 4, the fourth of its ambitious series of robotic explorations of our three inner planet neighbors. Mariner 1 was lost during launch; Mariner 2 successfully flew past Venus; Mariner 3 failed to deploy; but on July 14–15, 1965, the 575-lb Mariner 4 became the first spacecraft to fly past Mars and capture close-up images of another planet from space.
Of course the pictures that Mariner 4 captured were in greyscale and not like the beautiful color views we are used to seeing from spacecraft today. But thanks to one creative scientist at NASA (and a box of crayons) our first scenes of Mars from space were in brilliant color.
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THEMIS Takes Deimos’ Temperature
Infrared image of Deimos by THEMIS on Feb. 15, 2018 (NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU/SSI)
Can you feel the heat? NASA’s Mars Odyssey can see it! This is an image of Mars’ smaller moon Deimos, captured with Odyssey’s THEMIS (Thermal Emission Imaging System) instrument on Feb. 15, 2018. Part of the 7-mile-wide Moon was in shadow, but the sunlit surface area reached temperatures up to 200 K (that’s still pretty cold for us, though… –100ºF / -73ºC!)
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After 5,000 Sols We See the Face of Opportunity
Opportunity’s first-ever selfie on Mars, captured on Sol 5000. (NASA/JPL-Caltech/Jason Major)
It’s finally happened—after over 14 years on Mars (14!!!) NASA’s Opportunity rover has turned its arm-mounted camera around to take a look at itself, giving us the very first true “selfie” of the Mars Exploration Rover mission! Hello Opportunity!
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This is Earth and the Moon from 40 Million Miles Away
That’s here; that’s home; that’s us—the two bright objects in this picture are Earth and the Moon, imaged by NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft on January 17, 2018 from a distance of 39.5 million miles (63.5 million km).
This is about the distance between Earth and Mars at their closest points to each other (give or take about 6 million miles) or about 165 times farther away from us than the Moon.
