Making a big splash (pun intended) in the space news world today is the report that NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory rover Curiosity has found traces of water in samples of Martian soil! The samples were scooped from an area nicknamed “Rocknest” in October 2012 and analyzed with the SAM instrument suite (read more on that here.)…
Tag: solar system
Curiosity will check out these bright outcrops on her way to Mount Sharp
An outcrop visible as light-toned streaks in the lower center of this image has been chosen as a place for NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity to study for a few days in September 2013. The pause for observations at this area, called “Waypoint 1,” is the first during the rover’s trek of many months from the…
Titan’s Misty Mountains May Have “Roots As Nobody Sees”
It’s been thought for some time that Saturn’s largest moon Titan has a complex internal structure consisting of multiple layers of ice and liquid water. At one point it was even suggested that there are water ice “cryovolcanoes” on Titan, where watery slush oozes to the surface and freezes solid in the moon’s 270-degree-below temperatures,…
Incredible Images of Earth from Saturn and Mercury
What does the Earth and Moon look like from other planets in the solar system? Just more pretty little lights in the dark…
Cassini Snaps a Picture of Earth from 900 Million Miles Away
So did you get out and Wave at Saturn on The Day the Earth Smiled? If you did (and even if you didn’t) here’s how you — and everyone else on Earth — looked to the Cassini spacecraft in orbit around Saturn, 898.4 million miles away.* As Carl Sagan famously said, “That’s here, that’s home,…
A New Moon for Neptune!
Big, blue, and blustery, distant Neptune is the outermost “real” planet in our solar system — a frigid gas giant nearly 3 billion miles from Earth orbiting the Sun with a handful of faint ring segments and a retinue of 13 moons… um, on second thought, better make that 14.
New Horizons’ First Look at Pluto’s Big Moon
The two bright clusters of pixels in the image above might not seem like much of a big deal, but they are… those two blocky blobs are the dwarf planet Pluto and its largest moon, Charon, as seen by the rapidly-approaching New Horizons spacecraft, destined for its ultimate close encounter in July 2015! This represents…
On July 19, Smile and Wave at Saturn
…because Cassini will be watching — and taking pictures! In three weeks, on Friday, July 19, the Cassini spacecraft will be taking pictures from orbit around Saturn, capturing the ringed planet in eclipse against the Sun. This will not only provide fantastic views of the planet’s rings and atmosphere, but will also include another treat:…
Dione to Join the List of Moons with Underground Oceans?
Earth may display its seas on its surface for all the Universe to see, but further out in the Solar System liquid oceans are kept discreetly under wraps, hidden beneath cratered surfaces of ice and rock. And while Saturn’s moon Enceladus sprays its salty subsurface ocean out into space, other moons are less ostentatious —…
Passing 2-Mile-Wide Asteroid Has Its Own Little Moon
On the afternoon of Friday, May 31, 2013, at 4:59 p.m. EDT, the nearly two-mile-wide asteroid 1998 QE2 will pass by our planet at a distance of about 5.86 million km (3.64 million miles)… about 15 times the distance between Earth and the Moon. And although it poses no threat of impacting Earth neither during…
What would it look like to watch Daphnis fly past?
Maybe something like THIS: What a great combination: Daphnis (my favorite moon) and an artist’s interpretation of what it might look like to see it whiz past as it travels around Saturn inside the Keeler Gap, sending up waves in the rings as it goes! The image is by Erik Svensson, who came across my recent…
Research Reveals Rain Shadows from Saturn’s Rings
A rain of ionized water molecules falls into Saturn’s upper atmosphere from its rings, researchers from England’s University of Leicester have found. Using images from NASA’s Voyager spacecraft and more recent near-infrared observations from the Keck Observatory in Hawaii, it has been found that dark bands seen across Saturn are actually the “rain shadows” of…
Lights in the Dark 