Dynamic spike-like structures along the edges of Saturn’s rings are caused by oscillations of material that mimics the behavior of our entire galaxy…in other words, Saturn’s rings are a miniature version of the Milky Way! Along the outer edge of the dense B ring Cassini mission scientists have observed ring particles rising above the ringplane…
Tag: NASA
Peak Time
A crater’s central peak casts a long shadow in this image from Cassini, taken on October 17 as the spacecraft passed by Dione at a distance of 25,000 miles. 700-mile-wide Dione is literally covered in craters, faults and gouges, a testament to the ancient age of its frozen terrain. Many larger craters – like the…
Flare Up
I caught this image this morning on the SDO site…it shows an eruption of plasma from the Sun’s photosphere that stretches out several tens of thousands of miles…the hooked loop at the end could easily encircle the entire Earth! This image is from about 11am or so, within a couple of hours the structure had…
Like a Rolling Stone
A boulder leaves a bounding trail in the lunar dust Here’s a neat image for today: a detail of the central peak of Eratosthenes Crater, taken by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC), shows a trail a rolling boulder has left in the regolith (the fancy word for Moon dirt.) The boulder, located in the…
A Pair of Flares
A twisting pair of prominences erupt almost 50,000 miles above the surface of the sun in this image from SDO, taken today, October 21, 2010. This is a composite of two imaging wavelength filter images (AIA 304 and 171), combined to show surface (photosphere) detail as well as lower atmosphere (chromosphere) detail. The scale…
Stars and Stripes (and Titan!)
A color-composite RGB image of Titan, with a sliver of the rings and a scattering of stars in the background, taken by Cassini on October 18, 2010 from a distance of over 1.53 million miles. At 3,200 miles in diameter Titan is larger than the planet Mercury, boasting a complex – yet chilly – atmosphere…
Enceladus and the E Ring
This is really great…an out-of-the-box raw image from Cassini showing Enceladus jetting along inside the hazy, diffuse E-ring. The spacecraft was over 414,000 miles away from the 300-mile-wide moon when this was taken. As a bonus we get a nice scattering of background stars too! This is one of those images that would have been…
A Sphere of Ice
Here’s a wonderfully crisp portrait of Saturn’s moon Rhea, taken by Cassini on October 17, 2010 at an altitude of 24,300 miles. Illuminated on the right by sunlight, the left hemisphere is dimly lit by reflected light from Saturn. Rhea is Saturn’s second-largest moon after Titan, but at 950 miles across (compared to 3,200) Rhea is…
The Sun and the Moon
From an SDO image chosen as the Pick of the Week for October 15th, this shot is almost too cool to be real…but it is! As the New Moon passed between the Solar Dynamics Observatory and the Sun, the spacecraft in geosynchronous orbit got a view of the Moon’s silhouetted disc passing across its normally-unobstructed…
Solving a Martian Mystery
“The Red Planet bleeds. Not blood, but its atmosphere, slowly trickling away to space. The culprit is our sun, which is using its own breath, the solar wind, and its radiation to rob Mars of its air. The crime may have condemned the planet’s surface, once apparently promising for life, to a cold and sterile…
Carnival of Space 172
Wow. It’s been quite an exciting week in astronomy, with the passing of NASA’s much-needed budget proposal, the preparation of the shuttle Discovery for its final flight, China’s successful launch of its second lunar mission just this past Friday… and, of course, the monumental announcement of the discovery of a potentially Earthlike planet…
Lunar Hues
Look up at the moon on any clear night and you’ll see a cratered world shining down on you, in some phase of illumination or perhaps even full and round, with a few lighter or darker areas but for the most part all in cool, bright shades of whites and greys. The moon’s real colors…
Lights in the Dark 