Named after a 12th century Chinese artist, Xiao Zhao is a young 15-mile (24-kilometer) wide crater on Mercury. Its broad, bright rays indicate its youthfulness, as the lighter material ejected by the initial impact has not yet had enough time to grow dark. “Young” is a relative term, of course. On Mercury that can still mean…
Tag: science
A Little Lunar Levity
Sometimes astronauts just wanna have fun! The video above was taken during the Apollo 17 mission on December 11, 1972, when astronauts Gene Cernan and Harrison “Jack” Schmitt went off in search of lunar samples during an EVA (short for Extra-Vehicular Activity.) Enjoying the 1/6 gravity, Jack felt the urge to break into song. And can…
Temporal Distortion: A Stunning New Time-Lapse by Randy Halverson
Here’s a gorgeous new time-lapse video created by the talented Randy Halverson and featuring a dramatic score by composer Bear McCreary, recently of Battlestar Galactica and The Walking Dead fame. (Can’t see the video above? Watch in HD on Vimeo here.) Breathtaking! Read more about this video below:
A Growing Sunspot: AR1416
This animation, made from images taken by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, shows active region 1416 as it rotated into view over the past week, doubling in size as it approached the center of the Sun’s disk. According to SpaceWeather.com’s Dr. Tony Phillips, AR1416 is magnetically charged in such a way as to be ready to…
Hubble Spots Jupiter’s Spooky Northern Lights
Acquired in March 2007, this eerie image from Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys’s ultraviolet camera show glowing auroral emissions, always present in Jupiter’s polar regions. The aurora is hundreds of kilometers wide and about 250 kilometers above the planet. It is caused by electrically charged particles striking atoms in the upper atmosphere from above, the…
Titan. In color.
On Jan. 30, the Cassini spacecraft executed a flyby maneuver of Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, passing within 19,340 miles (31,130 km) of its surface. This color composite image of the cloud-covered moon was created by combining raw data acquired with Cassini’s Imaging Science System (ISS) in red, green, blue and clear color channels. The result…
Apocalypse? NO. (Despite What Chevy Says)
So the buzz is buzzing about Chevy’s Super Bowl ad and its tongue-in-cheek portrayal of the aftermath from the 2012 Mayan apocalypse. Of course the message is typical — drive a Chevy truck and survive, drive anything else and perish. Which is cute and of course the production value is high, but the problem is…
Martian Hazard #271: Falling Frost Avalanches!
As spring comes to Mars’ north polar latitudes, the added sunlight warms layers of subsurface CO2 ice, which can rapidly sublimate and force its way outwards and upwards. When this occurs along the edges of steep scarps, as seen in the image above, the rapid expansion of the CO2 – literally ‘dry ice’ – can…
Two New Moons For Jupiter
Jupiter is our solar system’s resident behemoth. It’s an enormous planet that has more mass than all the others combined, not to mention the largest gravitational and magnetic influence in the solar system (besides the Sun, of coourse.) It’s no wonder that it also has the most moons in orbit around it than any of…
First GRAIL Video Shows Moon’s “Dark Side”
See you on the dark side of the Moon*! NASA’s GRAIL mission has beamed back its first video of the far side of the moon. The imagery was taken on Jan. 19 by the MoonKAM aboard the mission’s “Ebb” spacecraft. GRAIL consists of two identical spacecraft, recently named Ebb and Flow, each of which is…
Giant Asteroid to Approach Earth Jan. 31
It’s huge – 21 miles across! It’s bright – magnitude 8.7, maybe more! And right now it’s coming close to Earth – the closest it’s come in 37 years! Why haven’t they told us about this?!? Well, actually they have. It’s asteroid 433 Eros, and on Tuesday it will come within 16.6 million miles of…
If You Like Pluto, Put a Ring on It
NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft is currently speeding through the outer solar system toward its July 2015 date with Pluto, when it will take a good close look at the dwarf planet’s mysterious surface, atmosphere, moons, and… rings? Less than three-quarters the size of our moon, Pluto nevertheless has no shortage of fascinating features. It has…
Lights in the Dark 