It’s the 2012 version of the “Blue Marble“! Here’s an amazing new high-definition portrait of our planet, made by NASA’s Suomi NPP satellite launched back on October 28. This is a composite image created from multiple scans taken with the satellite’s Visible/Infrared Imager Radiometer Suite (VIIRS). Suomi NPP is the first satellite designed to collect…
Tag: science
Solar Storm in Progress!
Yesterday’s solar flare sent out a huge cloud of charged solar particles our way, and this afternoon it impacted our magnetosphere… sparking a brilliant display of aurorae in northern skies such as those above the Aurora Sky Station in Abisko, Sweden.
Time For Some Stormy Solar Weather!
Any lapse in solar activity we may have seen during this period of “solar maximum” came to an end this weekend with some very energetic flares and CMEs, including the one seen above: an M8.7-class flare spotted by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) at 3:49 UT this morning. This comes just 4 days after a…
A View From The Top
From the top of the atmosphere, that is! This gorgeous photo, taken from the Space Station on November 24, 2011, looks over our planet’s limb just after orbital sunset. We get a good look at cloud structures, the thin shell of our atmosphere (it’s always surprising how thin it really is), airglow, stars, and what…
From the LITD Archives: Eclipsing Mimas
Originally published on May 16, 2009. LITD is almost 3 years old! This animation, made from a series of 8 raw images taken by Cassini on May 14, shows Saturn’s moon Mimas being eclipsed by another object…..a neighboring moon, perhaps? It’s not mentioned, but it definitely seems to be something of similar size, and round….
Mercury’s “Smooth” Plains
Mercury has a vast region of smooth volcanic plains surrounding its northern polar region, wrapping over a third of the way around the planet. But even though the plains are called smooth, they are still characteristically rugged – made obvious in this narrow-angle camera image from MESSEGER acquired December 13. Being an area close to…
More Evidence for a Wetter, “Volcanier” Mars
Spirit may have settled in for an eternal sleep on Mars but the data she’s sent back is still helping researchers piece together clues for a wetter history of the red planet! The image above, a false-color view from the “Home Plate” region where Spirit now sits, points to a feature geologists call a “bomb sag”….
Why Did Pluto Lose Its Planet Status?
Why isn’t Pluto considered a planet anymore?
ISS Performs a Lunar Pass
The right place at the right time… that’s all it took (along with some great camera skills!) for a NASA photographer at Johnson Space Center in Houston to capture some fantastic photos of the International Space Station (ISS) passing across the face of the moon! Read the rest of my article on Discovery News here.
Spacecraft Discovers Mercury Truly Is a “Hollowed” Planet
…although not in the way some people mean by the term. 🙂 The latest featured image from NASA’s MESSENGER spacecraft shows the central peak of the 78-mile (138-km) – wide crater “Eminescu” surrounded by brightly-colored surface features called “hollows”. Actually tinted a light blue color, hollows may be signs of an erosion process unique to Mercury because of its…
Brightest ISS Pass of 2012!
Ok, I know it’s kind of a misleading title because it’s only 4 days into the new year but still, at magnitude -4.0 tonight’s flyover of the ISS was one of the brightest I’ve ever seen, this year or any other! At 6:28 p.m. CST, the ISS rose in the northeast and passed nearly exactly…
No Doom in 2012: Stop the Insanity!
Now that’s we’re officially three days into 2012, the ‘net is already abuzz with talk of impending doom on December 21 of this year. Luckily there are plenty of science sources that are more than happy to offer fact-based consolation that there is no actual evidence that anything cosmically bad is expected to occur on…
Lights in the Dark 