The exploration rover Opportunity has identified what seems to be another ferrous extraplanetary visitor resting on the sands of Meridiani Plains. The 19-inch-long meteorite, shown here, has been dubbed “Shelter Island” by the MER team. Opportunity’s tire tracks are visible in the upper left. Opportunity spent six weeks in September and October investigating “Block Island”,…
Tag: science
A Cratered Crescent Composition
The crescent of Saturn’s moon Tethys hovers serenely over a dimly-lit ringplane in this raw image, taken by the Cassini orbiter on October 11, 2009. Frigid, airless and heavily-cratered, Tethys is mostly composed of water ice and rock. It is 662 miles wide. Image: NASA/JPL/SSI
Can’t Catch Me!
Windswept Martian dunes create a somewhat humanoid, running gingerbread-man figure in this image from the HiRISE camera aboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. The dunes reside within a crater in the southern hemisphere of Mars. This week, the University of Arizona released thousands of new images from their HiRISE (High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment) observations, taken…
Ring King
The bright band in this image is a cross-section of a massive new ring discovered around Saturn, a cold, diffuse and incredibly thick band of material orbiting the planet 3.7 million miles out…..much farther out than any of the other rings and farther away even than most of Saturn’s moons. The ring is so…
Eagle’s Landing Site
This is what the Apollo 11 landing site looks like today from lunar orbit via NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. Visible here is the remaining descent stage of the lander, a couple of left-behind scientific experiments and the tripod of a television camera as well as a dark trail of footprints to “Little West” crater left by…
First Rock From The Sun
While approaching the planet for the third flyby of its mission, the MESSENGER spacecraft took this photo of Mercury, crescent-lit by the sun and showing terrain that has never been imaged before. The region along the planet’s limb, the brightest area seen here, had yet to be mapped by the spacecraft’s cameras. It contains many…
Saturn in the Spring
The Cassini Imaging Team has released this image, a stunning portrait of Saturn made from 75 separate wide-angle exposures taken during the ringed planet’s spring equinox on August 12, 2009. The specific angle of sunlight during the equinox makes the shadow of Saturn’s expansive rings appear as a pencil-thin line across the cloudtops at the…
In Fact, It’s Cold As Hell
When you look up at the moon, you’re looking at what is now believed to be the coldest place in the solar system, according to recent data from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. Craters at the moon’s south pole stay in constant shadow, their rims blocking sunlight from reaching their interiors. In these areas of permanent…
Cracking the Surface
Images taken by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and Mars Global Surveyor satellites show dry, cracked surfaces within Martian craters. Previously thought to have been caused by subsurface permafrost contractions, it’s now believed these parched surfaces indicate the remains of dried lake beds. Similar to features found in dry lake beds on Earth, the cracks on…
A Beautiful Demise
I don’t usually post images of deep-space objects here but I had to make an exception for this one. With its most recent set of optics, installed in May 2009 during the STS-125 servicing mission (SM4), the Hubble Space Telescope is returning amazingly detailed images of distant, exotic objects – like the butterfly-shaped planetary nebula NGC 6302,…
Look on the Bright Side
Another view of Saturn’s moon Iapetus (see previous post) shows the brighter surface illuminated by the sun, with a section of the darker surface visible near the moon’s equator. This dual-coloration of the 914-mile-wide moon was first observed by Giovanni Cassini in 1671. Noticing that the moon was only visible when on the western side…
Next Stop: Jupiter
NASA’s “What’s Up” video series highlights Jupiter this month, and explains the upcoming Juno mission set to launch in August 2011.
Lights in the Dark 