Can’t see the video below? Click here. Today NASA held a press conference at 1pm EST to present the discovery of over 1,200 exoplanet candidates by the Kepler telescope, an orbiting space observatory that’s been watching a section of the sky near the constellation Cygnus for the past year and a half. (The spacecraft launched…
Tag: solar system
The Search for Alien Earths
Can’t view the video below? Click here. Fifteen years ago we didn’t even know there were other solar systems. Now there’s been over 500 planets discovered orbiting other stars in our galaxy, with new ones added to the list almost weekly. Scientists using the Keck Observatory in Hawaii, NASA’s orbiting Kepler spacecraft and other telescopes…
“A boulder as big as a house”
A high-res image of Mars’ moon Phobos, acquired on January 9 by ESA’s Mars Express, shows a large boulder on the irregularly-shaped moon’s southern hemisphere. It rests near the edge of a large crater…when I rotated the image it looked as if it should just start rolling backwards and slide right over the edge! (The…
A Close Pass
Here’s a close-up look at the extensively-cratered surface of Rhea, Saturn’s second-largest moon, captured by Cassini as it performed its closest flyby yet on the morning of January 11, 2010. Passing a mere 43 miles (69 km) over the surface, Cassini got a great look at some of the deep craters that literally cover the…
Radar Love
NASA’s Goldstone Solar System Radar, located in California’s Mojave Desert, recently made some detailed observations of asteroid 2010 JL33 on December 11 and 12, 2010 as it tumbled through space at a distance of 5.3 million miles – 22 times further away than the Moon! The radar images have also been assembled into a…
Saturn’s Skyline
A raw image from Cassini taken on January 9, 2011, this minimally-composed image is actually quite fascinating (IMO): it’s a look at the upper levels of Saturn’s atmosphere in methane wavelength! Yes, Saturn is a gas giant and most of its volume is made up of hydrogen and helium, but there are layers of its…
A World Turned Inside Out
Take a nice long look at this beautiful image of Io, the most volcanically active world in our solar system! This was assembled by Ted Stryk from Voyager 1 images, taken as the spacecraft passed by on March 4, 1979. At 2,263 miles (3642 km) wide Io is the third largest of Jupiter’s moons and…
Blowing off Steam
Remind me again why I love Cassini? Oh yeah, because of images like this. 🙂
Backlit Dione
Here’s a beautiful new image just in from Cassini: the silhouette of 700-mile-wide Dione seen against the sunlit limb of Saturn, its rings seen edge-on just above the moon. Some of Dione’s heavily-cratered terrain can be discerned along its southeastern edge. I particularly like the light halo effects along the edges of the moon and…
The Many Faces of Enceladus
A recently uploaded raw image from Cassini, this is a full-frontal view of 318-mile-wide Enceladus taken on November 30, 2010 during the spacecraft’s most recent flyby. Of particular note here is the moon’s heavily grooved and fractured surface, mostly water ice and rock, but strangely split into two sections of differing terrain – most noticeably…
Like Ships in the Night – Akatsuki Sails Right Past Venus
So close, but yet so far. In a poignant farewell, Japan’s Akatsuki spacecraft returned this image of Venus as it sped off into space, its attempt at establishing orbit having failed on Wednesday, December 8. The $300 million scientific observatory was created to study the atmosphere of our neighboring planet, as well as use its…
Dione and Tethys in Passing
Two of Saturn’s moons pass each other from Cassini’s perspective on December 6, 2010, in this animation compiled from 70 raw image files. This was more an experiment in using iMovie HD to create an animation from a lot of individual images than anything else…I didn’t take the time to clean up the specks and…
Lights in the Dark 