33 years after his death, John Lennon’s name has been officially given to a crater on Mercury. Imagine that. The 95 km (59 mile) wide Lennon crater is one of ten newly named craters on the planet, joining 114 other craters named since NASA’s MESSENGER spacecraft’s first Mercury flyby in January 2008.
Tag: solar system
A Portrait of Earth and the Moon from 4 Million Miles Away
21 years ago today, December 16th, 1992, NASA’s Galileo spacecraft took this image of Earth and the Moon from a distance of about 3.9 million miles (6.2 million km). It’s one of the few images ever captured that singularly show both worlds in their entirety. And to think that when this image was taken, our…
Jupiter’s Moon Europa Has Jets Like Enceladus!
“Attempt no landings there?” Ok, FINE. We’ll just fly a spacecraft through Europa’s newly-discovered plumes and get a taste of its underground ocean that way! Because it has them, and so we could. This was the big news from NASA, ESA, and Hubble researchers today: Jupiter’s ice-covered moon Europa (yes, the one from 2010) has…
“Take Us Home, Scotty…” Juno Takes the First Video of Earth and Moon From Space
If this doesn’t tug at your heart’s space strings, I don’t know what will. What we’re seeing here is a video made from images captured by NASA’s Juno spacecraft as it flew past Earth on October 9, 2013. This is the first second time* a video has been made of the Moon orbiting our planet from…
The Other Side of ISON: Here’s the Comet as Seen from Mercury
While many skywatchers, scientists, and astronomy enthusiasts around the world wait to see if comet ISON survives its perihelion — that is, its closest pass by the Sun — on Nov. 28, the MESSENGER spacecraft has captured an image of the incoming comet from its position in orbit around Mercury! The image above, shared today…
Watch this beautiful new trailer for “In Saturn’s Rings”
It’s a labor of love: using hundreds of thousands of real images taken by NASA’s Cassini, Galileo, Voyager, and other space exploration missions to create a stunning feature-length, high-definition IMAX movie that showcases the beauty of our Solar System on the big screen like never before. This is the achievement of “In Saturn’s Rings,” a…
Vesta’s Formation History? It’s Complicated.
Just when scientists thought they had a tidy theory for how the giant asteroid Vesta formed, a new paper from NASA’s Dawn mission suggests the history is more complicated. If Vesta’s formation had followed the script for the formation of rocky planets like our own, heat from the interior would have created distinct, separated layers…
NASA’s Surprising Discoveries About Three Near-Earth Asteroids
Every few days or so I like to check the “Close Approaches” page of JPL’s Near-Earth Object Program, just to see what sorts of cosmic objects are whizzing by our planet; how big they are, when they’ll come, and how far they’ll (hopefully!) miss us by. Most of them are relatively small asteroids several dozen…
Galileo’s Visit with an Asteroid, 22 Years Ago Today
Launched on its historic voyage to Jupiter on October 18, 1989, NASA’s Galileo spacecraft also got some good looks at several members of our solar system before it reached the giant planet — and one of them was the 12-mile-long asteroid Gaspra, of which it made its closest pass on October 29, 1991. The image…
Watch the Sun’s Skin Split Open (and Then Heal Itself)
Like some kind of stellar superhero (or maybe a cosmic vampire!) our Sun’s surface splits apart and then fuses itself back together in this mesmerizing video from SDO and the folks at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center — check it out! All right now, while the Sun doesn’t really have skin like we do or…
Meet the Asteroid That Could Smash Into Earth in 2880
There are over 10,000 near-Earth objects (NEOs) that have been identified so far, asteroids and comets of varying sizes that approach the Earth’s orbital distance to within about 28 million miles (45 million km). Of the 10,000 discoveries, roughly 10 percent are larger than six-tenths of a mile (one kilometer) in size – large enough to have…
It Wasn’t a Rock, It Was a Rock COMET!
Sometimes asteroids aren’t always what they seem. Such is the case with the asteroid Phaethon, which also happens to be the source of a well-known meteor shower in December. As it turns out, Phaethon isn’t an asteroid at all — it’s a comet. But don’t think it’s as cut-and-dried as that… Phaethon isn’t the “dirty…
Lights in the Dark 