It’s a dwarf planet with a giant family! Astronomers working with the Hubble Space Telescope have announced a new moon around distant Pluto, bringing the known count up to 5. The image above, just released by NASA, shows the Pluto system with its newest member, P5. Read more here.
Tag: NASA
Why It’s So Hard To Date a Crater
The 13-mile (21-km) wide Giordano Bruno crater on the Moon’s far side was recently imaged by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter at an angle at a time when the setting sun cast long shadows, creating the high-relief image seen above. It’s known that the brightly-rayed crater is relatively young (see the video below) but how young?…
Expedition 31 Sails Back to Earth
A Soyuz TMA-03M capsule descended to the steppes of Kazakhstan this morning at 4:14 a.m., returning Expedition 31 crew members Oleg Kononenko, Don Pettit and André Kuipers to Earth after 193 days working aboard the Space Station. The dramatic photo above was captured by NASA photographer Bill Ingalls, showing the Soyuz vehicle as it parachuted down…
Curiosity’s “Crazy” Landing
“When people look at it, it looks crazy. It’s a very natural thing. Sometimes when we look at it it looks crazy. It is the result of reason, engineering, thought… but it still looks crazy.” – Adam Steltzner, EDL Engineer On August 5, after nearly 9 months of travel, Mars Science Laboratory (aka Curiosity) will…
Ancient Ice Found in a Frigid Lunar Crater
NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has found water ice lining a deep crater located on the Moon’s south pole — as much as 22% of the surface material of the crater appears to be composed of ice, NASA and university scientists report.
A Dragon Is Berthed!
“Houston, Station — looks like we got us a Dragon by the tail.” NASA Astronaut Don Pettit, Expedition 31 Flight Engineer Space history has been made today! At 11:02 a.m. CDT, NASA’s Houston mission control announced a successful berth of the SpaceX Dragon capsule to the Harmony Node of the International Space Station, making it the…
How a Falcon Carried a Dragon Into the Future
In the dark hours before dawn this morning, Tuesday May 22, 2012, history was once again made along Florida’s warm and humid space coast. After a series of extensions and delays — and even one literal last-second scrub — SpaceX successfully launched its Dragon capsule aboard a Falcon 9 rocket… a trailblazing event that opens…
Three Devils, One Image
The HiRISE camera aboard NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Oribiter captured this image of Mars’ surface, showing the presence of three different dust devils in the same region. Dust devils are common during the springtime on Mars’ northern hemisphere, when increased sunlight heats the surface and causes air to rise rapidly in spinning columns. The image was…
Take a Look at Titan!
Here’s a great shot of Titan and Saturn acquired by Cassini on May 6, 2012 just after a pass by the haze-covered moon. It’s a color-composite made from images taken in Cassini’s red, green and blue color channels, and the resulting image was color adjusted a bit to appear more “Saturny”.
The Surface of an Asteroid
Bright craters, dark craters… craters shaped like butterflies… they’re all represented here in a panorama made from images acquired by NASA’s Dawn spacecraft, currently orbiting the 330-mile-wide asteroid Vesta. I stitched two images together (using a third for gap fill-in) that were originally acquired by Dawn’s framing camera in October 2011 and released last week. This shows…
NASA: In Pursuit of Light
Can’t see the video below? Click here. Here’s a new video from the folks at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, MD that will make you fall in love with the Universe…for the first time, or all over again. It’s a good reminder that, even though the shuttles are retired, NASA still has its…
OMG Wow: Shuttle Landing Caught on Video!
Can’t see the video below? Click here. This is one for the OMG Holy Crap files… a passenger on board an airplane waiting at JFK airport captured this incredible video this morning as the space shuttle Enterprise landed on the adjacent runway! Talk about a once-in-a-lifetime shot!
Lights in the Dark 