This is something really special, and everyone should know about it, and so I’m doing my part and sharing it here but please feel free to pass it along yourself as well. We now have publicly-accessible, high-definition video of our planet coming in live from the Space Station, thanks to the High Definition Earth Viewing…
Tag: science
Curiosity Smiles For The Camera In Her Newest Selfie
What were you doing on Sunday night? Whatever it was (and by the way I do hope it was watching Cosmos) about the same time, 59.5 million miles away, NASA’s Curiosity rover was taking her picture on Mars inside Gale Crater! Here’s Curiosity’s latest “selfie,” a mosaic I assembled from about a dozen images acquired…
Just Another Hazy Day on Titan
The weather forecast for Titan? Cloudy, hazy, and cold — just like every other day! The image here is a color-composite made from raw data captured by Cassini during a flyby on April 7, 2014, and it shows a look at the two main features of Titan’s atmosphere: a thick orange “smog” made of organic…
What Is Pluto? A New Video from New Horizons
Is Pluto a planet? A dwarf planet? A Kuiper Belt Object? All — or none — of the above? Pluto has been a topic of scientific fascination since Clyde Tombaugh discovered it in February 1930, and then a topic of controversy after the IAU reclassified it as a dwarf planet in 2006. While conversations continue…
Watch a Full Year of the Moon (in Five Minutes)
This is pretty neat — it’s a visualization of the Moon’s phases and libration all throughout 2014, made by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center Visualization Studio. They’ve done these several times in the past, and this is the latest one. For accuracy you just can’t beat it: the global terrain map you see in the…
Voyager’s Long-Distance Valentine
This is from a post I originally published in 2010. I’ll keep trotting it out until it’s not cool anymore. (Which I don’t think will ever happen.) On February 14, 1990, after nearly 13 years of traveling the solar system, the Voyager 1 spacecraft passed the orbit of Pluto and turned its camera around to…
Ganymede Gets a Little Geologic Love
We don’t get to hear a lot about Ganymede these days, what with everyone paying so much attention to Titan and Enceladus and Europa and several other moons out there. Which is too bad because 1. Ganymede is plenty fascinating in its own right; and 2. it’s the LARGEST MOON IN THE SOLAR SYSTEM (and…
A Visual Demonstration of Gravity, Courtesy of Cassini
Prometheus is at it again! On Feb. 5, Cassini acquired a series of images with its narrow-angle camera of Saturn’s reflective and ropy F ring, around the inside of which travels the shepherd moon Prometheus. As it orbits Saturn it regularly arcs outwards toward the inner edge of the F ring and tumbles back inwards…
Mars Gets a Brand New Crater
If you count at least slightly over two years old as “brand new” then yes, this one is certainly that! Seen above in an image taken by the HiRISE camera aboard NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter on Nov. 19, 2013, a 100-foot-wide (30-meter) crater is surrounded by bright rays of ejected material and blown-clear surface. Since…
What’s Inside an Asteroid?
What are asteroids made of? While composed of metals, rocks, ices, and also many elements that are difficult to find and retrieve here on Earth — hence the growing interest in asteroid-mining missions — these drifting denizens of the Solar System have many different possible ways of forming. Some may be dense hunks of rock…
HAWKING: The Intimate Story of Stephen Hawking’s Life
“Come with me and I will tell you the story of how I became who I am.” With those words, spoken through a custom-built computer and software controlled by the faintest movements of his cheek and eye muscles, 72-year-old physicist Stephen Hawking takes us on a journey through his own life. In this, his first…
Fastest, Farthest, First: New Horizons Closing in on Pluto
It’s a journey spanning 85 years and billions of miles: humanity’s first-ever encounter with the dwarf planet system of Pluto and Charon, located in the frozen far reaches of our Solar System where our entire planet is a barely-visible pale blue dot — just a “mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.” Launched in 2006,…
Lights in the Dark 