After weeks of waiting patiently, the first images are finally here! This video shows an arching prominence erupting from the surface of the Sun on March 30, 2010, as seen by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) in beautiful IMAX-quality high resolution. (By the way, AIA stands for Atmospheric Imaging Assembly, one of the three main tools…
Tag: NASA
In Living Color
I’ve been playing around with making color versions of images from the Cassini raw image downloads, now that I know what to look for it’s relatively easy to put together a somewhat “natural color” version of the sights around the Saturn system. (The image above was a little trickier, I had to take…
Between Two Worlds
The International Space Station is seen passing across the face of the Moon in this beautiful image, taken on April 5 by Fernando Echeverria about 15 minutes before the launch of Discovery. In photography timing really is everything! The Station’s altitude ranges from 173 to 286 miles above the Earth, traveling at a speed of…
This Week in Space
The Discovery crew outlines the upcoming STS-131 mission (scheduled to launch at 6:21am EST tomorrow), new ISS team members blast off to work from Kazakhstan, Toyota teams up with NASA to investigate some out-of-this-world causes to their products’ malfunctions, Spirit settles down for a long [Martian] winter’s nap, Saturn’s moon Mimas shows off its retro…
Flying Pan
Making a complete orbit in just under 14 hours, the 17-mile-wide shepherd moon Pan cruises around Saturn within the Encke gap in the A ring. In the image above, taken by Cassini on January 8, we can see Pan casting a sliver of a shadow onto the outer edge of the gap as it causes…
Lady’s Choice
Scientists prove it: a girl knows how to make up her mind. The image above shows the first target object – that football-sized layered rock – autonomously chosen by the Mars rover Opportunity on March 4. Opportunity selected the rock after taking a series of wide-angle panoramic images of the area and using her new…
You say potato, I say Prometheus.
Here’s a nicely processed-and-polished photo of Saturn’s moon Prometheus, fresh from the Cassini imaging center at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, CO. Taken during the spacecraft’s flyby of the F-ring’s shepherd moon earlier this year, this image shows Prometheus’ potato-like shape and heavily cratered surface on its trailing side, dimly illuminated by reflected light…
This Week in Space
The space shuttle Discovery prepares for launch and new discoveries from NASA’s Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer…kamikaze comets, another exoplanet spotted, a closer look at the moons Rhea, Pallene and Phobos, lost spacecraft, an interview with retired astronaut Bernard Harris and lots more in this edition of This Week in Space with Miles O’Brien. Enjoy! Provided…
When the Wind Blows
A huge 800-plus-foot-wide dust devil swirls across the parched plains of Mars in this image from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter’s HiRISE camera. Heading westward when the image was taken, it casts a tall diffuse shadow toward the northeast. This photo is part of a study of the knobby surface texture of the region in the…
Alone in the Universe
What’s it like to step through the hatch of a space shuttle and look out into the universe? The reality of it is deceptively incomprehensible to most, but Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield gives an amazing first-person description of his spacewalk experience to Universe Today’s Nancy Atkinson in this article. Check it out, he really stirs…
This Week in Space
The new IMAX: Hubble 3D astronaut stars and launch party at the Air and Space Museum in DC takes center stage in this edition of This Week in Space with Miles O’Brien. Also, the president prepares to support his new plans for NASA and the shuttle mission may get a stay of execution (as long…
A Pack of Spokes
Typically, spokes in Saturn’s rings – temporary, shifting bands of material that transect the rings lengthwise – appear as bright streaks when seen from high phase angles but they show up here as subtle dark bands in this low-angle image from Cassini, taken January 27. Some of the brighter rings on the right half of…
Lights in the Dark 