In another rare oblique-angle view from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter we get a look at the hilly highland terrain around a lunar crater called Vertregt J. The image above shows a shadow being cast by a cratered ridge…check out the image at right for a larger zoomable view of the region. (This area is on…
Tag: NASA
Roving the Edge
Here’s a great view of Santa Maria crater made from a couple of raw images from the Opportunity rover, taken earlier this month and assembled by Stu Atkinson. (I did take the liberty of cropping the original image a bit and filling in some of the sky at upper right.) I particularly like the texture…
A Close Pass
Here’s a close-up look at the extensively-cratered surface of Rhea, Saturn’s second-largest moon, captured by Cassini as it performed its closest flyby yet on the morning of January 11, 2010. Passing a mere 43 miles (69 km) over the surface, Cassini got a great look at some of the deep craters that literally cover the…
At Crater’s Edge
Here’s a fantastic look at an inner wall of Santa Maria crater on Mars, the latest stop for the rover Opportunity on its travels across the Meridiani plain. Colorized by Stuart Atkinson for his Opportunity-dedicated blog The Road to Endeavour, this is a section of a larger panoramic image showing the crater’s rim and jumbled…
Following a Moon Shadow
Can’t see the video below? Click here. Here’s an intriguing video assembled by Daniel Macháček, made from archived image data from NASA’s Viking 1 orbiter; on September 28, 1977, over a year after dropping a probe onto the Martian surface, the orbiter captured images of the shadow of Mars’ moon Phobos passing over the billowy top…
Don’t drink the water…
Another timely goodie from xkcd! 🙂 (And in case you don’t get it, read this.)
Where the Sun Don’t Shine
There are places surprisingly close by that are the coldest known spots in the entire solar system: on our Moon’s south pole lie deep craters that never receive direct sunlight, in fact have never seen the Sun, and within these craters lie pockets of ice that contain the same frozen material they’ve had since forming…
A Sinuous Strand
Featured on the Solar Dynamics Observatory’s Pick of the Week, this image from the observatory’s AIA 304 camera shows a gigantic filament snaking around the Sun’s southern hemisphere, hundreds of thousands of miles of magnetically-contained plasma made visible in extreme ultraviolet light. Filaments are bands of relatively cooler, denser solar material caught up in magnetic…
Saturn’s “Storm Alley”
Dark swirling vortices march along Saturn’s “storm alley” in this section of an image taken by Cassini on May 19, 2008. (It was recently uploaded as a featured image on JPL’s Flickr page.) Storms on Saturn are huge and powerful, with winds blowing many hundreds of miles per hour and often featuring lightning ten thousand…
Sweet Sixteen: Jupiter in Motion
This video, made up of 16 images assembled from Voyager 1 data by astro-artist Björn Jónsson and animated by Ian Regan, shows a time period spanning 16 Jupiter days (about 7 days Earth-time) wherein we can briefly observe the dynamics of the different cloud belts and spinning storms in the gas giant’s swirling atmosphere. Especially prominent is the…
Mercury’s Ancient Scar
One of the largest craters discovered in our solar system, Mercury’s Caloris basin measures in at over 963 miles (1550 km) wide…easily big enough to contain the state of Texas or all of the Great Lakes! This mosaic image shows the huge crater in its entirety – it’s the light-toned region that dominates the central part…
It’s All Downhill
This image from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter shows a close-up of an 80-foot-wide boulder on the central peak of Gassendi Crater, a trail left behind it in the dark lunar soil. There’s even a bit of a pile-up of soil in front of it where it came to rest! Several smaller boulders on either side…
Lights in the Dark 