NASA’s Curiosity rover may be getting all the attention on Mars these days but the real overachiever is Opportunity — it’s been busy exploring, studying, and traveling across the planet’s surface for over 12 years now and still going strong! Launched July 7, 2003, the rover is currently in its 4,270th sol — 4,180 past…
Tag: NASA
The Old Charon in the New Charon’s Arms
An image like this could only be captured by an observer who’d traveled the 3.2 billion miles to take it beyond the orbit of Pluto! Luckily for us, in July 2015 we had exactly that: the New Horizons spacecraft, which had spent the previous nine and a half years soaring across the Solar System.
This Giant Ice Volcano on Pluto is All Wright
This bumpy wrinkled pucker is actually an enormous ice volcano — i.e., a cryovolcano — on the surface of Pluto, imaged by the passing New Horizons spacecraft on July 14, 2015. Informally called Wright Mons, the feature is about 90 miles (150 km) across and 2.5 miles (4 km) high, about as high as some of the tallest…
And the Award for Leading Trojan Moon Goes To…
Drumroll please… the little moon Telesto! (You like it, you really like it!) This image, captured by Cassini on Jan. 14, 2016, shows Saturn’s moon Telesto – a “leading trojan” of the much larger satellite Tethys. A trojan moon is one that orbits a parent body within the same path as a more massive satellite,…
A Craterful of Cracks
Here’s a view of a section of a crater on Mars filled with a lacework of bright spidery fractures, acquired on Sept. 20, 2015 with the HiRISE camera aboard NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. The crater is approximately 3 miles (5 km) wide and located in Mars’ north polar region, and its old, infilled interior has undergone countless millennia…
Plutonium is Back on the Menu, Future NASA Missions!
While I highly advise against humans making a meal out of it (despite my headline) the radioactive element plutonium has long been a staple energy source for many of NASA’s space missions, from Apollo’s ALSEPs to the twin Voyagers to the Curiosity rover.* But the particular non-weapons-grade flavor that NASA needs — plutonium dioxide, aka Pu-238 — has not been…
Cassini Has Made Its Last Pass by Enceladus. Here Are the Pictures.
After nearly eleven and a half years in orbit around Saturn the Cassini spacecraft has made its last-ever targeted flyby of Enceladus, the 320-mile-wide moon of Saturn that has intrigued scientists and the public alike with its active water ice geysers for more than a decade since their discovery. On Saturday Dec. 19, 2015, Cassini performed its E-22…
Soar Over the Surface of Tethys with Cassini
On Nov. 11, 2015, NASA’s Cassini spacecraft passed relatively closely by Saturn’s moon Tethys, one of the ringed planet’s larger icy satellites. The animation above was made from 29 raw images acquired with Cassini’s narrow-angle camera as it passed by; you can see part of the incredibly cratered and ancient surface of this 662 mile (1,065 km) wide…
NASA Hits Halloween Asteroid With Radar
On the afternoon of Oct. 31, 2015, Earth was visited by something much creepier than the typical Halloween trick-or-treater: a dark 2,000-foot (600-meter) -wide asteroid that sped silently (because space) by, approaching at its closest only about 1.3 times the distance to the Moon. Designated 2015 TB145, this particular near-Earth object had only just been…
Pluto Looks Amazing (Again) in the Latest View From New Horizons
At the beginning of September the world was treated to a fantastic view of the night side of Pluto, captured by the New Horizons spacecraft as it departed the distant icy world on July 14, 2015. Backlit by the sun, Pluto’s surprisingly complex atmospheric haze created a ghostly glow above its crescent-lit limb while frozen mountains cast…
Pics Are In from Cassini’s Flyby Through Enceladus’ Plumes!
On Wed. Oct. 28 Cassini performed its lowest-altitude dive yet through the icy plumes of Enceladus, coming just 30 miles from the moon’s surface — that’s only about 6 times higher than a commercial airliner at cruising altitude. But, traveling over 19,000 mph relative to Enceladus (which is 38 times faster than a jet plane!) the pass was…
Pluto’s Moon Kerberos Gets Into the Picture
For decades, far-off Pluto and its moons were just a collection of bright spots in even our most powerful telescopes. Now the dwarf planet and its family of five moons has been revealed in intimate detail with the long-awaited flyby of the New Horizons spacecraft. Last week the “family portrait” of the Pluto system was made…
Lights in the Dark 