A wonderful raw image from the Cassini spacecraft showing a crescent-lit Saturn and one of its 61 known moons. Honestly I’m not sure which moon this is. Could be Tethys, could be Titan, it’s hard to make out in this wide-angle view. Also in crescent, its night side is dimly lit by reflected “Saturnshine”. Cassini…
Tag: planet
All About Abedin
This image from the MESSENGER spacecraft shows the crater Abedin, recently named after Bangladeshi painter Zainul Abedin. The 68-mile-wide crater exhibits a central peak structure and is surrounded by lines of smaller craters, most likely caused by the ejected debris from the initial impact. Most of the features on Mercury have been named after the…
Rings in Relief
This wide-angle view from Cassini, taken on August 16 (2009), shows an amazing amount of relief across the surface of Saturn’s A ring as well as a long shadow cast by the wake of the shepherd moon Daphnis within the Keeler gap. 4.3-mile-wide Daphnis, almost too small to be seen here, sculpts the edges of…
Dark Rings
The shadow of Saturn’s rings is reduced to a thin sliver running across the face of the planet in the upper part of this image taken on August 12, one day after its spring equinox. The rings appear dark in this image, since the sunlight is striking them edge-on and Cassini’s cameras are set so…
The Ghost and the Darkness
A spectral figure casts a long shadow as it travels along the path of Saturn’s F ring on August 7, 2009 in this image from the Cassini orbiter. Not a ghost per se but rather a clump of ring material, pulled upwards from the rest of the ring plane by what is perhaps a small…
The Iron Giant
“It’s big,” said Mars Exploration Rover team member Ray Arvidson. And at approximately the size of a beach ball, about 2 feet wide, it is the largest meteorite fragment found so far on Mars. The Opportunity team spotted the rock, now known as “Block Island”, during the rover’s travels across the dunes of Meridiani Planum….
Pluto Reinstated?
Will Pluto be reissued its former status as a full-fledged planet? While it won’t necessarily be a topic of debate at next week’s meeting of the International Astronomical Union – the group in charge of, amongst other things, the official naming of all things extraterrestrial and thus the group responsible for voting Pluto off the…
Blast Zone
The Hubble Space Telescope trained its newly-installed Wide Field Camera 3 on Jupiter, capturing a photo of the recent impact scar made on July 19. This image is the first taken by the new camera installed in May, and while it’s still uncalibrated, details can be seen of the dark debris plume that has spread…
Shifting Sands
Serpentine dunes etch the polar sands of Mars in this image from the HiRISE camera aboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. See the original release here. The MRO was 194 miles above the surface when it took this photo. Image: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona
The Oceans of Venus?
It’s hard to imagine, with its pressure-cooked 800º baked-rock surface, but Venus may have once had oceans, suggests data from the European Space Agency’s Venus Express orbiter. Extensive infrared mapping of Venus’ southern hemisphere shows large areas of rock that appears to be granite. Granite, as we know it on Earth, is formed when basalt…
Sunday Best
Another fantastic image of one of my favorite subjects from the Cassini mission: the little shepherd moon Daphnis and its icy wake within the Keeler gap. This is an adjusted version of a raw image taken Saturday, July 11, and received at the imaging center in Boulder, CO later the same day. See the original…
Subtle Shades
The intricate structure of Saturn’s rings is seen here in this raw image from Cassini, taken yesterday. This (I believe) shows the dark material of the Cassini Division (bottom) below the brighter bands of the A ring (middle to top). I could be mistaken though, and this is instead the inner section of the B…
Lights in the Dark 