An incredible 1,200-mile-wide vortex of spiraling clouds swirling above Saturn’s north pole is seen in all its glory in this stunning image from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft, originally captured last year but recently released by NASA on April 29. Taking advantage of a new orbital trajectory that puts it high above Saturn’s rings and poles, Cassini…
Tag: NASA
Proof that Meteors Hit Saturn’s Rings… a Lot
(News from NASA) NASA’s Cassini spacecraft has provided the first direct evidence of small meteoroids breaking into streams of rubble and crashing into Saturn’s rings. These observations make Saturn’s rings the only location besides Earth, the Moon and Jupiter where meteor impacts have been observed as they occur. The meteoroids at Saturn are estimated to range…
The Horsehead Nebula Like You’ve Never Seen It Before
Holy Horsehead, Batman! You’ve probably seen photos of the famous Horsehead nebula in Orion many times before, but NOTHING like this! Astronomers have used NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope to photograph the iconic Horsehead Nebula in a new, infrared light to mark the 23rd anniversary of the famous observatory’s launch aboard the space shuttle Discovery on…
Europa Has Water and H2O Too
According to research by NASA astronomers using the next-generation optics of the 10-meter Keck II telescope, Jupiter’s ice-encrusted moon Europa has hydrogen peroxide (aka H2O2) across much of the surface of its leading hemisphere, a compound that could potentially provide energy for life if it has found its way into the moon’s subsurface ocean. “Europa has the…
A Clear Blue Sky on Mars
There’s nothing like a beautiful sunny day in Gale crater! The rusty sand crunching beneath your wheels, a gentle breeze blowing at a balmy 6º C (43º F), Mount Sharp rising in the distance into a clear blue sky… wait, did I just say blue sky? Yes I did. But no worries — Mars hasn’t…
Highlighting Rhea’s Subtle Colors – New Cassini Images of Saturn’s Moon
This is a color composite image of Rhea (pronounced REE-ah) I made from raw images acquired by the Cassini spacecraft on March 9, 2013, during its most recent — and final — close pass of the moon. The visible-light colors of Rhea’s frozen surface have been oversaturated to make them more apparent… even so, it’s…
The Sun is Awesome
It really is. I mean, nevermind that it contains 99% of all the mass in the Solar System, that it supplies our planet with the energy needed to sustain life, that its constantly-blowing solar wind helps keep some of those nasty cosmic particles out of the planetary neighborhood, and that it makes a bright sunshiny…
So What Did Asteroid 2012 DA14 Actually Look Like?
Something like this: This video was made from 72 radar observations made on the night of Feb. 15/16, 2013, by NASA scientists using the 230-foot (70-meter) Deep Space Network antenna at Goldstone, CA. The target object, a ~40-meter wide asteroid named 2012 DA14, passed within 17,200 miles (27,680 km) of Earth — coming several thousand…
This Asteroid Will Pass Closely on Friday, But No Chance of Impact
All eyes have been on the incoming near-Earth asteroid 2012 DA14 over the past few weeks, with many speculations of if — and what if — the 50-meter-wide space rock poses any danger to us here on Earth. True, it will come well within the orbit of the Moon, even passing by closer than geosynchronous…
The Tragedy of Apollo 1
Today marks the 46th anniversary of one of the worst tragedies to befall NASA and human spaceflight: the fire that broke out in the Apollo 204 (later renamed Apollo 1) command module during a test exercise at Kennedy Space Center in 1967, claiming the lives of primary crew astronauts Virgil “Gus” Grissom, Ed White, and…
Mercury’s Cratered Crescent (in Color!)
Every now and then a new gem of a color-composite appears in the Flickr photostream of Gordan Ugarkovic, and this one is the latest to materialize. This is a view of Mercury as seen by NASA’s MESSENGER spacecraft during a flyby in October 2008. The image is a composite of twenty separate frames acquired with MESSENGER’s…
Floes of Frozen Methane May Be Floating on Titan’s Lakes
Although surface temperatures on Titan are cold enough that methane can exist as a liquid, filling lakes and flowing in streams, it may sometimes get so cold that even the liquid methane and ethane freezes, forming floes and icebergs of frozen hydrocarbons. This Titanic revelation was announced today during the 221st American Astronomical Society meeting…
Lights in the Dark 