Cassini mission scientists have more support for the existence of an underground ocean on Enceladus, in the form of negatively-charged ions present in the moon’s southern ice geysers. In a report released February 8, 2009, the Cassini Science League announced that researchers have identified these ions using the spacecraft’s plasma spectrometer data from recent flybys…
Tag: science
Shear Delight
Monstrous eddies in Saturn’s upper atmosphere are clearly visible in this near-infrared image from Cassini, taken in November 2009 and released on NASA’s planetary Photojournal on February 4. Winds on Saturn are some of the fastest in the solar system, blowing around the planet in opposing bands at speeds of several hundreds of miles per…
Carnival of Space #140
Welcome! I’m very honored to host the 140th edition of Carnival of Space here on Lights in the Dark, especially considering that this week marks this site’s one-year anniversary! It’s really been a fascinating year for me. I’ve had a lot of fun finding and featuring images from the various missions exploring our solar system…from…
Night Moves
After some delays over the weekend, this morning Endeavour lifted off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, in what was officially the last nighttime launch of the space shuttle. Watch the video of the liftoff and rocket separation below, recorded from NASA TV. The STS-130 mission carries the Tranquillity module to the International Space Station and the…
Moons Near and Far…and More to Come!
246-mile-wide Mimas (foreground) and 70-mile-wide Epimetheus bracket a section of Saturn’s rings in this color-calibrated image from the Cassini spacecraft, taken in October 2009. Happily, we can expect to see beautiful images like this for another  7 years…NASA has extended the Cassini mission until at least 2017! During that time Cassini will transition into its…
A Patchwork Pluto
The New Horizons spacecraft may still be several years away from its flyby of the outermost ex-planet, but the Hubble Space Telescope is meanwhile grabbing glimpses of the frozen world at the edge of our solar system. The video above is composed of hundreds of individual images of Pluto, assembled over the course of four…
Fire in the Sky
Around 6pm local time, February 3 2009, a large fireball was seen in the evening skies over Ireland. First video of the blazing meteor can be seen above. Reports are coming in that the “desk-sized” meteor may have landed in a field. It may be a piece of a larger object that exploded in the…
Work Well Done
A poignant entry on xkcd.com, a webcomic by Randall Munroe. This is based on the recent news that the rover named Spirit will now officially be a “stationary science platform”. After repeated attempts to dislodge it from its current location, wheels hopelessly embedded in soft sand in a locale called “Troy”, the decision was made…
Solar Cover-Up
ESA’s new Proba-2 solar observation satellite captured this stunning image of the annular eclipse that as visible across Africa and Asia on January 15. In an annular eclipse the moon is further from the Earth than it would be during a total eclipse, so part of the Sun remains visible. This eclipse has been the…
Prometheus Passing
Prometheus, shepherd moon of Saturn’s F ring, is featured in this dramatic image from Cassini taken as it passed by at a distance of 23,000 miles (37,014 km) on January 27, 2010. This is the closest Cassini has come to Prometheus. The image above has been extensively cleaned up in regard to CCD pixel noise…
Let’s Go Streaking
Streaks of swirling pastel colors mark eroded, windswept bedrock within a large crater on Mars in this HiRISE image from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. The enhanced colors highlight the differences in surface texture…the original RGB image in approximate true-color can be seen here. The full map-projected enhanced color image of the region can be found…
Diagonal Dunes
Symmetrical dune ridges line up within the basin of a Martian crater in this HiRISE image from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, taken on December 28, 2009. Rocks and boulders line the crater floor between them. With the MRO’s computers now back online observation of the Martian surface can resume in full effect, providing us with…
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