Yes, stop. Whatever you’re doing (unless it’s open-heart surgery in which case what are you doing online you quack) stop it right now and just look at this. It’s a new version of the high-resolution images of Pluto acquired by New Horizons on July 14, 2015, except here color data was added to create an enhanced-color…
Tag: planet
Japan’s AKATSUKI Will Get a Second Chance at Venus Next Week
Note: this is a repost of an article from Feb. 2015 with a couple of updates. If any of you remember it back in Dec. 2010 Japan’s Venus Climate Orbiter spacecraft AKATSUKI (aka Planet-C), after a five and a half month journey through space, failed to enter orbit around Venus due to a faulty thruster nozzle….
Pluto Is the New Science Star of the Solar System
Now over four months after the historic and long-awaited flyby of Pluto by New Horizons, planetary scientists have had a steady stream of unprecedented data arriving on Earth from the outwardly-speeding spacecraft. We’ve learned more about Pluto in the past few months than we had over the decades before and the information is still being analyzed…
Pluto Looks Amazing (Again) in the Latest View From New Horizons
At the beginning of September the world was treated to a fantastic view of the night side of Pluto, captured by the New Horizons spacecraft as it departed the distant icy world on July 14, 2015. Backlit by the sun, Pluto’s surprisingly complex atmospheric haze created a ghostly glow above its crescent-lit limb while frozen mountains cast…
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…
NASA Delivers a Brand-New Blue Marble Pic
It’s over halfway through 2015 and perhaps it’s high time for an all-new, updated, knock-your-socks-off “blue marble” photo of our beautiful planet Earth. And so earlier this week NASA delivered just that, courtesy of the high-definition EPIC camera (yes, that’s a real acronym) aboard the DSCOVR spacecraft positioned nearly a million miles away toward the Sun. The…
Another Mountain Range Discovered on Pluto
A new image from New Horizons has emerged, showing a new, smaller mountain range on the southwestern border of Pluto’s “heart” region. The image was captured during the July 14 flyby, during which time the spacecraft passed less than 8,000 miles from the planet’s surface.
Pluto’s Ice Mountains Revealed in Stunning Detail
At 3 p.m. EDT today, July 15 2015, from the Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, the New Horizons team revealed to the world the first high-resolution image acquired of the surface of Pluto. This was obtained during the historic July 14 flyby with New Horizons’ “Ralph” camera, and it’s our very first close-up view of…
Share the Pluto Love!
It’s happened! At 7:49 a.m. EDT (11:49 UTC) this morning, July 14, 2015, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft performed its close pass of Pluto and, fourteen minutes later, its moon Charon. While we won’t receive a signal from New Horizons until about 9 p.m. tonight (and image data from the flyby won’t arrive until July 15th)…
Pluto: Prelude to a Flyby
This is Pluto, imaged by New Horizons’ LORRI camera on July 12. It’s (once again) the best view yet, captured from a distance of 2.5 million km / 1.5 million miles. Check out all that geology – craters, depressions, chaos terrain of some sort… at no time in human history has anyone ever seen this world in…
This is Where MESSENGER Impacted Mercury
On April 30, 2015, after more than ten years in space – four of those in orbit – MESSENGER‘s mission and operational life came to its conclusive (and expected) end when it impacted the surface of Mercury. While the spacecraft’s approximate impact location was predicted by mission engineers (it was out of sight of Earth at the time)…
Here’s Pluto Like You’ve Never Seen It Before!
…no, really. There hasn’t been an image this detailed of Pluto and its moon Charon in pretty much EVER. (Which makes total sense since New Horizons is the FIRST spacecraft to visit it and it has less than a week and .05 AU to go until its closest pass!) So actually everything you’ll see of…
Lights in the Dark 