Scientists using the Hubble Space Telescope have identified a new moon in orbit around distant Pluto. Estimated to be between 8 to 21 miles (13 to 31 km) in diameter the moon has been designated P4… at least until a more fitting name can be decided upon. P4 lies between the orbits of Nix and…
Tag: science
Dawn: Orbit Established!
It’s confirmed: Dawn has entered orbit around the asteroid Vesta! The spacecraft, which launched in September 2007, has been steadily approaching the giant asteroid for several months. Its mission is to orbit Vesta for a year, studying its surface and composition, and then push off toward the even larger asteroid Ceres. Actually classified as a…
From the LITD Archives: Face to Face
Remember the photo of the mysterious “face on Mars” taken by the Viking spacecraft in 1976? Well here’s the same landform, imaged by the HiRISE camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. Just goes to show that things aren’t always what they seem. The surprisingly human-looking “face” was really just a trick of the light combined…
Curiosity in Action
Can’t see the video below? Click here. Here’s a very cool video, an animation created by the folks at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory showing the descent, landing and operation of the next rover headed to Mars: the Mars Science Laboratory, a.k.a. “Curiosity.” Curiosity just recently arrived in Florida after a cross-country flight from JPL’s facility…
Big Sisters
Here’s a color-composite image of Rhea and Titan, Saturn’s largest moons. Made from raw images acquired by the Cassini spacecraft on June 16, 2011, this really shows the vast difference in size and appearance of the two moons. Rhea, seen in the foreground, is an icy, airless and heavily-cratered world 950 miles wide. Titan, on…
A “Feast of New Observations” from Mercury
This image, a color view of the northwestern rim of the 32-mile-wide Degas crater on Mercury, is just one of the most recent images to come in from NASA’s MESSENGER spacecraft. It has been in orbit around Mercury since March 18 – just under three months – and already its findings have revolutionized what we…
From the LITD Archives – VLT: A Space Opera
Can’t see the movie below? Watch on YouTube here. Here’s an enchanting video by the European Southern Observatory highlighting the discoveries of their Very Large Telescope (VLT) array, high in the mountains of the Atacama Desert in Chile. The Atacama is the driest place on Earth, far from the light pollution of major cities, and thus…
Look on the Bright Side
Here’s a color-composite image of Saturn’s two-toned moon Iapetus; its Saturn-facing light side is seen here facing to the lower left. Iapetus is 1,471 km (914 miles) wide. The raw images were taken by the Cassini spacecraft on June 6, 2011 and received on Earth June 8, 2011. The camera was pointing toward Iapetus from…
Bounce and Flow
Dark flows run down the slopes of Stevinus A crater on the Moon in this detail of an image from the LRO’s camera. Large boulders that have rolled downhill appear to have interrupted the flow in at least one spot in this image. It’s still not exactly known whether these features in Stevinus A are…
Crescent Mercury
MESSENGER’s latest image of Mercury!
Moonhenge
Long shadows are cast by sunlit boulders crowding a hill in Anaxagoras crater on the Moon. This image taken by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC) shows an area known as an impact melt – a result of the original collision that created the 50-kilometer-wide crater. Because of the lack of obvious large impacts in…
From the LITD Archives: Sinking the Shot
Alan Shepard may have played some moon golf during his visit in 1971 but even he wouldn’t have been up to par with this course. 😉 This photo shows the trail of a house-sized (33-foot-wide) lunar boulder that has rolled downhill and come to rest inside the rim of a crater. The image was taken…
Lights in the Dark 