After some tense moments tonight at JAXA HQ, it has been determined that the spacecraft Akatsuki has performed the necessary thruster burn to establish orbit around Venus! Congratulations Akatsuki and JAXA!
Tag: News
These Are Now Our Best Views Yet of Pluto’s Surface
I’ve mentioned before that better and better image data would be arriving on Earth from the New Horizons spacecraft, and these new pictures prove it!
Pics Are In from Cassini’s Flyby Through Enceladus’ Plumes!
On Wed. Oct. 28 Cassini performed its lowest-altitude dive yet through the icy plumes of Enceladus, coming just 30 miles from the moon’s surface — that’s only about 6 times higher than a commercial airliner at cruising altitude. But, traveling over 19,000 mph relative to Enceladus (which is 38 times faster than a jet plane!) the pass was…
Icy Enceladus Shines in the Latest Images from Cassini
On Wednesday, Oct. 14 2015, Cassini performed its scheduled “E-20” close pass of Enceladus, a 320-mile-wide moon of Saturn that is now famous for the organics-laden ice geysers that fire from cracks in its southern crust. E-20 is the first of a series of three flybys to be performed before the end of 2015, specifically timed to…
NASA Sciences the Sh*t Out of Mars, Finds Water
So on the same week that the highly-anticipated film “The Martian” opens in U.S. theaters (you are going to go see it, I assume) NASA revealed the latest discovery regarding the Red Planet: there is water on the surface there, salty rivulets that periodically run down steep slopes in Hale Crater and stain its sands with dark…
Comet 67P Confirmed To Be a Contact Binary
Ever since we got our first good look at Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko from the approaching Rosetta spacecraft in 2014 it has been considered to be a textbook example of a contact binary, with its “rubber duckie” double-lobed shape consisting of an oval “head” and flat-bottomed “body” joined by a “neck.’ Now, using data gathered by Rosetta’s…
Supermoon Eclipse 2015
Last night a large part of the world’s population was treated to a relatively rare variety of a not-so-rare night sky spectacle: a total lunar eclipse that happened to coincide with the closest perigee Moon (aka “supermoon”) of the year. The last time these scenarios lined up this way was in 1982, and it won’t occur…
Cassini Bids Farewell to Dione with Some Fantastic Final Views
NASA’s venerable Cassini spacecraft may still have another two years left in its exploration of the Saturn system but on Monday, August 17, it had its final intimate visit with Dione, one of Saturn’s largest natural satellites at nearly 700 miles (1,126 km) across. On that day Cassini passed within 300 miles (480 km) of Dione at 2:33 p.m. EDT (18:33…
Rosetta’s Perihelion-Bound Comet Fires a Fountain Into Space
On July 29, with ESA’s Rosetta spacecraft in orbital tow, the 2.5-mile (4-kilometer) -long Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko fired its brightest jet yet since Rosetta’s arrival just over a full year ago, on Aug. 6, 2014. Most of the images of 67P showing jets and outgassing activity released over the past few months have been edited to…
No This Is Not an Alien Cave Crab on Mars
I’m in a debunking mood today, probably brought on by the seasonal “double Moon hoax” that raises its oh-so-wrong head every August. (Read more on that nonsense here.) So here’s one more thing to say “NO” to: giant alien cave crabs on Mars. Apparently there’d been some buzz recently in the “space woo” circles online…
Mars Will NOT Be As Big As The Moon In The Night Sky
No, no, no…a thousand times NO: Mars will not become a “second Moon” in the sky on August 27. It won’t this year, it didn’t last year, and it didn’t in the past dozen years since this silly yet strangely perennial cyber-legend (yes I just used the prefix “cyber”) first started circulating on teh interwebz. I don’t know…
Behold the Hidden Colors of Pluto
This newly-released picture of Pluto isn’t quite what our eyes would perceive… but then our eyes aren’t high-tech scientific imaging sensors like the ones aboard New Horizons! An enhanced-color image made from data acquired by the spacecraft’s LORRI and Ralph cameras on July 13, 2015, this view of Pluto shows the many variations in surface compositions…
Lights in the Dark 