Opportunity panorama of Santa Maria Crater rim. © Stuart Atkinson. As Opportunity wraps up her stay at Santa Maria crater, Stuart Atkinson leaves us with this wonderful “Ansel Adams style” panorama of the crater’s rim and dune-carpeted interior. “I’m very, very jealous of the people who will one day make a pilgrimage to this…
Tag: science
Titan’s Spring Showers
It’s spring here in Earth’s northern hemisphere – and on Saturn’s cloudy moon Titan as well! This image, taken by Cassini in October of last year, shows bright clouds covering part of the moon’s equatorial and southern regions. These clouds were not always visible…in fact, they formed relatively quickly as Saturn and its moons moved…
Recycling the Empties
During a shuttle launch, the two white solid rocket boosters (SRB’s) attached to the main orange tank detach first* and fall back to Earth, landing in the Atlantic. These are retrieved by NASA ships and ferried back to be refurbished and refilled for the next mission…a process that requires the efforts of many experienced professionals,…
MESSENGER’s Day in the Sun
After 7 years and almost 5 billion of miles of traveling around the blistering inner solar system NASA’s MESSENGER spacecraft is finally ready for the moment it was created for: orbital insertion around Mercury, the innermost planet! At 9pm EDT tomorrow MESSENGER will attempt to establish orbit and if successful will become the first spacecraft…
Northern Exposure
Cassini gets a nice look at Enceladus’ icy, cratered north pole in this image, taken on December 21, 2010. In the background we catch a glimpse of Saturn’s rings as well! Fantastic image. The Cassini spacecraft was about 20,000 miles (34000 km) from Enceladus when this was taken, using its narrow-angle camera. 318 miles across…
Tethys and Saturn
660-mile-wide Tethys orbits in front of Saturn and the rings in this image from Cassini, taken on March 8, 2011. The rings cast their shadows onto the Saturn’s southern equatorial cloudtops as the planet continues moving into its summer season. The 155-mile-wide Melanthius Crater can be seen near Tethys’ south pole. A smaller…
An Opportunity From Above
The eye in the sky sees all…especially when that eye is the HiRISE camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter! Here’s another great image – this time in color! – of the crater known as Santa Maria, taken from over 150 miles above the Martian surface by the MRO…and if you look carefully at the lower…
From the LITD Archives: Mercury’s Ancient Scar
One of the largest craters discovered in our solar system, Mercury’s Caloris basin measures in at over 963 miles (1550 km) wide…easily big enough to contain the state of Texas or all of the Great Lakes! This mosaic image shows the huge crater in its entirety – it’s the light-toned region that dominates the central part…
Detachable Prominence
Here’s the latest image of the Sun from photographer Alan Friedman, showing incredible surface detail as well as the remnants of a detached prominence that had erupted from active region 1166 on March 3, 2011. This image was taken during a Winter Star Party event in West Summerland Key, Florida. “A close-up look at the…
Dione in the Distance
Cassini looks past the southern pole of Rhea to get a view of Dione on the far side of the rings in this image, captured on January 11, 2011. Rhea, Saturn’s second-largest moon, is approximately 950 miles in diameter and is literally covered in craters. Dione, also heavily cratered, is nearly 700 miles wide. It’s…
Discovery: Lighting Up the Night
Looking quite regal on Kennedy Space Center’s Pad 39A, Discovery gets lit up by powerful xenon lamps in this animation made from live video feed images taken on the night before her final launch. As of this writing the shuttle liftoff is on schedule for 4:50pm EST on Thursday, February 24. The images above were…
Slicing Saturn
In this beautiful image from Cassini we see a dramatically-lit Saturn, its rings slicing across its equator as a thin bright line and casting shadows onto its atmosphere below. A great example of how Saturn’s gigantic ring system is hundreds of thousands of miles wide but only about 30 feet thick! This image was captured…
Lights in the Dark 