With a leading side dark as charcoal and trailing side bright white, the 914-mile-wide Iapetus is literally the yin-and-yang of Saturn’s family of moons. The color variation on Iapetus is due to the fine coating of dark material that falls onto its leading hemisphere, possibly sent its way by smaller, distant Phoebe traveling within the…
Tag: science
Flight Over Candor Chasma
If you could climb into a helicopter and fly over a valley on Mars, what would it look like? Well (regardless of the fact that a helicopter probably wouldn’t work very well in the thin Martian air) it would probably be a lot like this – a beautiful animation sequence created by Adrian Lark showing…
A Pack of Spokes
Typically, spokes in Saturn’s rings – temporary, shifting bands of material that transect the rings lengthwise – appear as bright streaks when seen from high phase angles but they show up here as subtle dark bands in this low-angle image from Cassini, taken January 27. Some of the brighter rings on the right half of…
Holy Dione
The heavily creased and cratered face of 700-mile-wide Dione is partially lit by the Sun in this image from Cassini, taken on March 4. Some of the moon’s characteristic “wispy lines” can be seen along its sunlit limb…these are the bright, exposed walls of icy canyons caused by ancient tectonic activity. The darker surface material…
This Week in Space
Buzz muses on the next steps for NASA (and his upcoming stint on “Dancing with the Stars”), the Space Coast braces for lay-offs, new proof of lunar ice, Discovery heads (slowly) to the launch pad, Mars’s potentially-hollow moon Phobos gets a close-up, revisiting a comet, windy black holes, blue marbles, icebergs and more on this…
An “Outie” Crater
This image from the HiRISE camera aboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter shows an “inverted” crater within an ice-rich debris apron just south of a mountain on Mars. Ice deposits beneath and within the soil – recently discovered using ground-penetrating radar – cause the terrain to move, distorting the landforms within it over time. As the…
Portrait of Io
Here’s a beautiful high-resolution portrait of Io by Jason Perry, assembled from Galileo images taken in 1999 and posted to The Gish Bar Times, his website dedicated to Jupiter’s volcanic moon. Check out the link for a labeled version of the image as well as details on how it was created. Slightly larger than our…
Ice World
662-mile-wide Tethys, as seen by Cassini on March 3, 2010. Part of the 1200-mile-long Ithaca Chasma can be seen on its western edge, running north to south. With a density .97 times that of liquid water, Tethys is almost completely made of ice. Image has been adjusted to bring out surface details. Image: NASA/JPL/Space Science…
Phobos Flyby Success
No need to fear, Phobos is here! (That’s a particularly bad pun on Phobos being the Greek god of fear……er…nevermind.) Yesterday’s flyby of Mars’ tiny moon was a success, as the animation below shows using actual data from the event. This latest pass only utilized the ASPERA instrument, which studies the way Phobos interacts with…
Slices of Light
While waiting for images from Cassini’s flyby of Rhea I saw this raw image, showing the stark crescent of Enceladus above the bands of Saturn’s rings, seen edge-on. A beautiful composition that deserved sharing. Where’s the moon’s geysers, you say? Don’t worry. They’re there. They just need the right lighting. Image: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute UPDATE: And…
Deep Impacts
This just in, a late straggler from Cassini’s recent flyby of Mimas. It shows the northern region of the “other side” of Mimas opposite the moon’s signature Herschel crater. The sheer walls of some of the craters near the top left are 2-3 miles high – or deep, depending on how you look at it…
Slope Streaks
This image from the HiRISE camera aboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) shows streaks of dark-colored material lining the walls of a trough (left side) and tapering out onto its floor. One of the few currently active geologic processes on Mars, this streaking may be caused by finely-grained soil moving downhill in much the same…
Lights in the Dark 