Ceres’ Haulani Crater, with a diameter of 21 miles (34 km), shows evidence of landslides from its crater rim. Smooth material and a central ridge stand out on its floor. This image was made using data from NASA’s Dawn spacecraft when it was in its high-altitude mapping orbit, at a distance of 915 miles (1,470…
Tag: science
NASA Sets Sail to Study Ocean and Climate
NASA has launched on another mission of exploration, except this time it wasn’t on a rocket ship from Cape Canaveral but rather on a research ship from Cape Cod. NASA’s North Atlantic Aerosols and Marine Ecosystems Study—aka NAAMES—is a five-year-long investigation to resolve key processes controlling ocean system function, their influences on atmospheric aerosols and clouds…
Hail Hydra: Pluto’s Moon is Covered in Almost Pure Water Ice
Discovered in June 2005, distant Pluto’s outermost moon Hydra it thought to have formed during the same collision four billion years ago that created the Pluto-Charon system that we see today. Yet despite its age this 31-mile (50-km) -long moon appears remarkably clean and bright, as witnessed by New Horizons during its close pass through the Pluto system in July 2015.
Take a Ride with Alan Shepard Aboard Freedom 7
55 years ago today, at 9:35 a.m. EST on May 5, 1961, NASA astronaut Alan B. Shepard, Jr. became the first American to travel into space with the launch of his Freedom 7 vehicle atop a Mercury-Redstone rocket. Shepard reached an altitude of 116.5 miles during his 15-minute suborbital flight before splashdown in the Atlantic,…
A New Moon is Discovered in the Solar System
Turns out there is something new under the Sun, at least to us; on Tuesday, April 26 scientists announced the discovery of a new moon in the Solar System—but it’s not around Earth, or Jupiter, or Saturn, or any of the planets that you’ve long been familiar with. This new moon is orbiting a distant world even…
New Analysis of Apollo Data Reveal the Moon is Hollow
New analysis of data acquired by seismometers placed on the Moon’s surface in the early 1970s and laser measurements taken during recent lunar meteor impact events appears to support an ongoing, if unpopular, hypothesis that our Moon is, in fact, hollow.
This is the Oldest Surviving Photo of the Moon
These days anyone with a cheap point-and-shoot camera or even a cell phone can snap a picture of the Moon (although I highly advise using at least an entry-level dSLR) but there was a time when that wasn’t the case. Go back to the late 1830s, when photography was in its infancy and methods for capturing light…
Ceres’ Bright Spot Looks Like a Giant Zit
After more than a dozen years of head-scratching we finally have our first really good look at the weird bright spot on Ceres, thanks to NASA’s Dawn spacecraft and its low-altitude mapping orbit (aka LAMO) around the dwarf planet. Appearing from 240 miles up as a dome covered in cracks and rising from the surrounding darker…
The Scale of the Solar System With a Soccer Ball, a Drone, Pin Heads, and Planet Nine
I love models that demonstrate the incredible size and space of the Solar System, very much so because many illustrations and diagrams fail to portray it accurately (and for very good reason…it’s enormous.) The most recent is shown here, enthusiastically created and narrated by former NASA engineer Mark Rober. This particular demonstration is unique in…
Surprise! Pluto May have Clouds
We could be calling it Cloudgate—”leaked” information from internal emails identifying structures in Pluto’s already hazy atmosphere that could very well be clouds, based on a March 4 article in New Scientist. The image above shows sections of a New Horizons image attached to an email sent by SwRI scientist John Spencer, in which he noted particularly…
Europe’s Sentinel-3A Returns Gorgeous “First Light” Earth Images
Captured by the EU’s Copernicus Sentinel-3A satellite on Feb. 29, 2016, this beautiful composition of blacks, purples, and blues shows the twilight transition across the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard, located north of the Arctic Circle between Norway and the North Pole. The snow-covered and fjord-cut large island of Spitsbergen can be seen at the right edge, while sea ice…
Apollo 10’s “Outer-Space-Type Music” Explained
There’s been some buzz recently (no pun intended, Mr. Aldrin) concerning supposed “space music” heard by Apollo 10 astronauts while they were traveling around the far side of the Moon in May of 1969. This is in no small part due to the season three opener of NASA’s Unexplained Files* on the Science Channel, which aired on…
Lights in the Dark 