After more than nine years of rocketing outwards through the Solar System, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft is now zeroing in on its targets: the dwarf planet Pluto and its family of frozen moons, orbiting the Sun over three billion miles away from Earth. The images above show Pluto and its largest moon Charon on January 25…
Tag: solar system
Dawn Captures the Bestest Images Ever of “Hipster Planet” Ceres
This is the second animation from Dawn this year showing Ceres rotating, and at 43 pixels across the images are officially the best ever obtained! NASA’s Dawn spacecraft is now on final approach to the 590-mile-wide dwarf planet Ceres, the largest world in the main asteroid belt and the biggest object in the inner Solar System that has yet to…
Hello, Ceres! Dawn Returns Images of Dwarf Planet Spinning
Wow, check this out! The 590-mile-wide dwarf planet Ceres is seen rotating in this GIF animation made from the latest images from NASA’s Dawn spacecraft, taken over the course of an hour on January 13, 2015. Dawn was 238,000 miles (383,000 km) from Ceres when the images were taken, and although only 27 pixels across…
Remembering Huygens’ Titan Landing, Ten Years Later
This incredible image was captured ten years ago today, on January 14, 2005. It shows the murky surface of Saturn’s moon Titan as seen by the European Space Agency’s Huygens probe after it made its historic descent through the moon’s thick haze and clouds and landed in a frozen plain of crusty methane mud and icy pebbles….
Half-kilometer Asteroid to Pass Closely By on January 26
Just under two weeks from now, on Monday, Jan. 26, the 1/3-mile (0.5-km) -wide potentially hazardous asteroid 357439 (2004 BL86) will pass by Earth at 3.1 lunar distances, or 739,680 miles (1,190,400 km). While this may sound like a long way off, in the grand scheme of things it’s still a close pass… especially for…
Find Out How “Crazy Engineering” Is Getting Dawn to Ceres
Remember Dawn, the spacecraft that showed us our first close-up images of asteroid/protoplanet Vesta when it entered orbit back in 2011? Well Dawn is still going strong, having left Vesta behind and now closing in on its next target: Ceres, a full-fledged dwarf planet and, at about 600 miles (965 km) wide, the largest object in the main asteroid belt. Once…
Eppur Si Muove: Galileo’s Big Night
Note: This is an edited repost of an article from 2014. 405 years ago tonight, January 7, 1610, the Pisan astronomer Galileo Galilei looked up at a bright Jupiter at opposition through his handmade telescope and saw three little “stars” next to it, which piqued his natural scientific curiosity. He soon realized that these little…
NASA Wants to Send Humans to Mars, But What About Venus?
NASA, SpaceX, Mars One… all (and others) are actively working on plans to send humans to the surface of Mars at some time within the next few decades. And while the first human exploration of the Red Planet will be a truly momentous and historic event in whatever fashion it ends up being – it…
Here’s Your Chance to Name a Crater on Mercury!
On March 18, 2011, MESSENGER became the first human-made spacecraft to enter orbit around Mercury. Now almost four years, eight billion miles, and over 260,000 images later, MESSENGER is nearing the end of its operational life. To commemorate the many achievements of the mission, scientists from NASA and the MESSENGER teams at the Johns Hopkins…
It’s Time to Say Bon Voyage to Venus Express
Launched in 2005, the European Space Agency’s Venus Express successfully entered orbit around our cloud-shrouded neighboring world. Now, after more than eight and a half years of scientific observations Venus Express has run out of fuel and will soon go gentle into that good night – that is if by “going gentle” you mean death-diving…
An Ocean Beyond Earth: Europa Awaits
It’s no secret that Earth’s ocean is filled with life, much of it still a mystery or totally unknown to science. But what about the ocean on other worlds? I’m not talking about sci-fi planets or suspected alien Earths around other stars, but right here in our own solar system, where an ocean even deeper than ours lies…
Dear Jupiter: Use More Sunscreen
It’s the signature accessory of the largest planet in our solar system: Jupiter’s Great Red Spot, an enormous anticyclone over twice the width of our entire planet. Visible in even modest backyard telescopes, the GRS has been churning away for at least several hundred years. But, based on recent analysis of data gathered by the Cassini spacecraft…
Lights in the Dark 