On March 9, 2017, NASA’s Curiosity rover took this picture with its turret-mounted MAHLI camera of the calibration target installed near the “shoulder” of its robotic arm. In addition to color chips and a metric line graph, the target also includes a U.S. coin: a 1909 Lincoln penny, adhered heads-up. Curiosity’s coin isn’t just for good luck…
Tag: NASA
Our Best Ever Look at Pan, Saturn’s Little “UFO”
Behold the almighty Pan! Thanks to Cassini’s ring-grazing orbits we’ve just received the highest-resolution images ever of Pan—which, at only about 17 miles (27 km) across admittedly isn’t very “almighty” but its flying saucer-like shape is really quite fascinating! The raw images above were acquired by Cassini on March 7, 2017 and received on Earth on…
Cassini Pinpoints a Propeller in Saturn’s Rings
NASA’s Cassini spacecraft captured these images of a propeller in Saturn’s A ring on Feb. 21, 2017. These are the sharpest images ever taken of a propeller and reveal an unprecedented level of detail. This propeller is nicknamed “Santos-Dumont” after the Brazilian-French aviator who is hailed as the father of aviation in Brazil. The February 2017 imaging…
A Look Back at Sojourner, the First Rover on Mars
The first mission to successfully* send a rover to Mars, NASA’s Mars Pathfinder, launched on Dec. 4, 1996. It was a “budget” Discovery mission designed to demonstrate a low-cost method for delivering a set of science instruments to Mars and sent the first remote-controlled vehicle to be used on another planet. Solar-powered and only a foot in height,…
Clementine: Lost and Gone Forever, But Never Forgotten!
One of my all-time favorite space images is this little gem from the Clementine mission to the Moon, launched January 25, 1994. It features a view from beyond the far side of the Moon, illuminated by reflected light off the Earth off frame to the left. The Moon is blocking the disc of the Sun with the glow…
Curiosity’s Tracks Are Gone With The Wind
Mars may have an atmosphere just 1% the density of Earth’s but it can still stir up enough of a breeze to quickly cover a rover’s tracks, as evidenced in the animation above. Captured by Curiosity’s downward-looking Mars Descent Imager (MARDI) camera on Jan. 23 and 24, 2017, the two pictures show an approximately 3-foot-wide…
SpaceX Says It Will Fly Humans Past the Moon in 2018 (But It Still Must Meet NASA’s Needs)
On Monday, Feb. 27, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk announced plans for his company to send two privately-paying “space tourists” on a trip around the Moon in late 2018. According to Musk it’s a voyage that would send them, aboard SpaceX’s still-in-development Dragon 2 spacecraft, on a “long loop” past the Moon and out to about 400,000 miles…
Cassini Mission Highlight: Mile-High Spikes Along Saturn’s B Ring
Icy particles along Saturn’s B ring rise dramatically in mile-high spikes, seen by Cassini in August 2009. (NASA/JPL-Caltech/SSI) A field of spike-like structures rise up over two miles from the outer edge of Saturn’s B ring in the amazing image above, captured by Cassini during Saturn’s spring equinox in August 2009. These pointy perturbations are caused by…
NOAA and NASA Open a New Set of Eyes on the Sun
Look out SDO—there’s another set of eyes watching the Sun in a wide swath of wavelengths! The images above are the first from the Solar Ultraviolet Imager (SUVI) instrument aboard NOAA’s new GOES-16 satellite, positioned in a geostationary orbit about 22,200 miles from Earth. These are SUVI’s first successful test images, captured on Jan. 29, 2017; once fully…
Seven Earth-sized Exoplanets Discovered Around a Single Nearby Star!
In what’s being called a “record-breaking exoplanet discovery” NASA announced today the detection of not one, not two, not three or four but seven exoplanets orbiting the ultra-cool dwarf star TRAPPIST-1, located just under 40 light-years away in the constellation Aquarius. (That’s astronomically very close, although still 235 trillion miles distant.) What’s more, these exoplanets aren’t bloated hot…
OSIRIS-REx Captures a Picture of Jupiter from L4
NASA’s OSIRIS-REx may be designed to study asteroids close up but recently it’s captured a view of something farther away and much, much larger: the giant planet Jupiter and three of its largest moons at a distance of over 400 million miles! The image was taken on Feb. 12, 2017, when the spacecraft was 76 million…
Juno Will Not Enter Tighter Orbits Around Jupiter, Team Decides
NASA’s Juno spacecraft will remain in 53-day-long orbits of Jupiter rather than rocket down to smaller 14-day orbits, despite the mission’s original plan to do so. Announced today, Feb. 17, this decision comes after evaluation of issues with helium valves that prevented orbital reduction burns in October and December of 2016. “During a thorough review, we looked at multiple scenarios that…
Lights in the Dark 