All those worlds may be ours except Europa but that doesn’t make the ice-covered moon of Jupiter any less intriguing. Beneath Europa’s crisscrossed crust lies a tantalizing ocean somewhere in the neighborhood of 100 kilometers deep—which adds up to more liquid water than on the entire surface of the Earth. Liquid water plus a heat source(s) to keep it…
Tag: NASA
The Closest Image of Asteroid Bennu Yet
(From the OSIRIS-REx mission site) Captured on April 14, 2020, this image shows the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft’s sampling arm – called the Touch-And-Go Sample Acquisition Mechanism (TAGSAM) – and asteroid Bennu during the mission’s Checkpoint Rehearsal. The chosen sample site “Nightingale” is visible in the left of the image frame, located in the relatively clear, dark patch….
This is the First Picture Taken on the Moon
At 18:45:30 UTC on February 3, 1966 the Soviet Luna 9 spacecraft made the first successful robotic soft landing on the Moon. Seven hours later it began to transmit images from the lunar surface down to Earth. The image above comprise the first two frames of the first of three panoramas captured by Luna 9’s cycloramic…
Earth and Moon as Seen from Mars
This is an image of Earth and the Moon captured from Mars by the Mars Orbiter Camera (MOC) aboard NASA’s Mars Global Surveyor on May 8, 2003. It was the first time an image had been captured from another planet—i.e., by a spacecraft in orbit—showing both bodies as discernible planetary disks, in phases. At that time Mars…
Nine Reasons to be Grateful to Live on Earth
(Via NASA) Earth can sometimes feel like the last place you want to be. Many forward thinkers and sci-fi authors have devised inventive ways we could move civilization off this planet. Sure, the promise of a better life in the mysterious beyond can be seductive. But the fact is the more we learn about “out there,”…
Miranda Just Looks All Wrong
This is a mosaic of Uranus’ moon Miranda made from images acquired by NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft on January 25, 1986. Color added as an approximation to natural color (from what I could determine online.) The incredible ~20km-high Verona Rupes cliff can be seen at lower left along the moon’s limb. The rest of the…
NASA CubeSat Will Shine a Laser Light on the Moon’s Darkest Craters
(Via NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory | JPL) To support the next wave of human exploration, the Lunar Flashlight mission will look for potential ice hidden at the Moon’s South Pole. As astronauts explore the Moon during the Artemis program, they may need to make use of the resources that already exist on the lunar surface….
Hubble Marks 30 Years in Space with a Tapestry of Blazing Starbirth
(Via NASA) A colorful image resembling a cosmic version of an undersea world teeming with stars is being released to commemorate the Hubble Space Telescope’s 30 years of viewing the wonders of space. In the Hubble portrait above, the giant red nebula (NGC 2014) and its smaller blue neighbor (NGC 2020) are part of a…
Newly Reprocessed Images of Europa Show ‘Chaos Terrain’ in Crisp Detail
(Via NASA) The surface of Jupiter’s moon Europa features a widely varied landscape, including ridges, bands, small rounded domes and disrupted spaces that geologists call “chaos terrain.” Three newly reprocessed images, taken by NASA’s Galileo spacecraft in the late 1990s, reveal details in diverse surface features on Europa. Although the data captured by Galileo is…
NASA’s Perseverance Rover Mission Getting in Shape for Launch
(Via NASA) Engineers working on NASA’s Mars 2020 Perseverance rover mission at Kennedy Space Center in Florida have begun the process of placing the Mars-bound rover and other spacecraft components into the configuration they’ll be in as they ride on top of the United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket. Stacking spacecraft components on top of each…
Telescopes and Spacecraft Team Up to Probe Deep into Jupiter’s Atmosphere (NASA article)
NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and the ground-based Gemini Observatory in Hawaii have teamed up with the Juno spacecraft to probe the mightiest storms in the solar system, taking place more than 500 million miles away on the giant planet Jupiter. “Juno’s microwave radiometer probes deep into the planet’s atmosphere by detecting high-frequency radio waves that…
How Government Geologists Recreated the Moon in Flagstaff, Arizona
From July 1969 to December 1972 the astronauts of NASA’s Apollo missions explored the alien landscape of the lunar surface, flag-planting, kangaroo-hopping, shuffling, digging, and Grand Prix-roving across six sites on the Moon. In order to prepare for their off-world adventures though, they needed extensive practice here on Earth so they would be ready to execute the…
Lights in the Dark 