It sounds like a surprise challenge posed by the “Dungeon Master” in a game of Dungeons & Dragons but this is sort of what happened on a cosmic scale on Feb. 6, 2017, when the 200-meter (656-foot) -wide asteroid 2017 BQ6 passed by Earth. Using the radar imaging capabilities of the giant 70-meter antenna at…
Tag: science
Junocam Image of the Earth-Sized “Red Spot Jr.” Storm on Jupiter
Everyone knows about Jupiter’s famous Great Red Spot, the centuries-old giant anticyclone on Jupiter’s southern hemisphere 2-3 times the size of Earth. But there are many other smaller (but still huge by terrestrial standards!) storms on Jupiter, the largest of which is Oval BA—also known as the “Red Spot Jr.” The image above shows this…
HiRISE Eyes Fresh Craters on Mars
Just to remind you that things are still indeed going “boom” in our Solar System, here is a cluster of fresh craters on Mars created by an impact that occurred sometime between 2008 and 2014. The craters are a result of a meteorite that broke apart during entry, striking the surface as fragments within a localized area….
Astronomers Witness a Star’s Blazing Death by Black Hole
A star’s violent death by black hole has been spotted by researchers from the University of New Hampshire, using observations made by three orbiting x-ray space telescopes. Located in a small galaxy 1.8 billion light-years away, the event demonstrates what happens when a star gets too close to a supermassive black hole and gets torn apart,…
What Warmed Mars? The Curious Case of the Missing Carbonate
Everything we’ve observed so far about the surface of Mars points to an ancient past that was warmer, wetter, and very possibly habitable for life as we know it. From the scars of enormous floods and vast branching river deltas that are etched into the Martian surface to the rounded pebbles of ancient stream beds…
This Nebula Really Stinks!
This image from the Hubble Space Telescope shows the Calabash Nebula, the cosmic death throes of a low-mass star like our Sun. Caught during the astronomically brief phase between a red giant and a planetary nebula, the star is ejecting much of its mass out into space at velocities of over 620,000 mph. So why does it “stink?” The bright…
NASA’s OSIRIS-REx Will Search for Asteroids Caught In Earth’s Orbit
Launched on Sept. 8, 2016, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft is heading out into the main asteroid belt beyond the orbit of Mars to meet up with the 1,600-foot-wide asteroid Bennu. Ultimately OSIRIS-REx will map and collect a sample of Bennu’s surface, returning it to Earth in 2023. But while it’s still traveling through near-Earth space in…
Earth: Enhanced! NASA’s EPIC Global Views Get an Online Image Boost
From a vantage point of nearly one million miles away NASA’s EPIC camera aboard NOAA’s DSCOVR satellite captures an image of the entire Earth every 1-2 hours as it rotates. For the last year and a half or so these pictures have been uploaded on the EPIC website for public viewing and use as they originally look to…
New Horizons Fine-Tunes Its Course for MU69
A little goes a long way—especially when you’re traveling 51,000 mph! On Feb. 1, 2017 NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft performed a 44-second thruster burn that adjusted its course by just under 1 mph toward its next target, the Kuiper Belt object 2014 MU69. “One mile per hour may not sound like much,” said mission Principal…
Yes, Obi-Wan, That’s a Moon
Saturn’s 250-mile-wide icy moon Mimas shines in direct sunlight and reflected light from Saturn in this image, a composite of raw images acquired by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft on Jan. 30, 2017 and received on Earth today, Feb. 1. This is a bit of a “Frankenstein” job I made, assembled from five separate narrow-angle camera images taken in…
Here’s What It Would Look Like to Land on Pluto’s Heart
What would it look like to approach Pluto for a landing? Perhaps some day in the future a robotic mission will do exactly that and we’ll know for sure, but for now we have to use our imaginations…luckily we do have some incredible images of Pluto to help with the details, thanks to NASA’s New…
NASA’s Launching Rockets in Alaska to Study Ozone-Killing Compounds
A Black Brant IX sounding rocket was launched 175 miles high early Friday morning, Jan. 27, 2017, from the University of Alaska Fairbanks’ Poker Flat Research Range to study levels of nitric oxide in the atmosphere as part of the Polar Night Nitric Oxide Experiment (PolarNOx). “The aurora creates nitric oxide, but in the polar night there is no significant…
Lights in the Dark 