NASA’s OSIRIS-REx may be designed to study asteroids close up but recently it’s captured a view of something farther away and much, much larger: the giant planet Jupiter and three of its largest moons at a distance of over 400 million miles! The image was taken on Feb. 12, 2017, when the spacecraft was 76 million…
Tag: solar system
Can Pluto Be a Planet Again Already?
Ever since the discovery of Pluto by Clyde Tombaugh in 1930 our Solar System was known to have nine planets orbiting the Sun. “My Very Eager Mother Just Served Us Nine Pizzas” was a popular mnemonic in my elementary school days to help remember the order of major planets from Mercury outward. But in 2006,…
Juno Will Not Enter Tighter Orbits Around Jupiter, Team Decides
NASA’s Juno spacecraft will remain in 53-day-long orbits of Jupiter rather than rocket down to smaller 14-day orbits, despite the mission’s original plan to do so. Announced today, Feb. 17, this decision comes after evaluation of issues with helium valves that prevented orbital reduction burns in October and December of 2016. “During a thorough review, we looked at multiple scenarios that…
Voyager 1’s Famous Long-Distance Valentine
If you’re in love with space then you’ll fall head over heels for this: it’s a picture of Earth taken from the Voyager 1 spacecraft after it passed the orbit of Pluto back in 1990—on Valentine’s Day, no less. That image of our planet from almost 4 billion miles away inspired Carl Sagan to write his famous…
An Asteroid Approaches Your Planet: Roll a d10
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…
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….
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…
The “Front” Side of Tethys
This is a color image of Saturn’s moon Tethys I made from raw images acquired by Cassini on Feb. 1, 2017 in visible-light color channels. It shows the moon’s sunlit leading side—the face that aims in the direction that it moves in its orbit around Saturn. (Click image for a larger version.) While this icy moon is…
On This Day in 1966 We Got the First Picture from the Moon
On Feb. 3, 1966 the Soviet Luna 9 spacecraft made the first successful robotic soft landing on the Moon. Seven hours later it transmitted its first images of the lunar surface back to Earth. The image above is Luna 9 lander’s first view—the first time humans had ever seen a picture from the surface of another world.
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…
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…
Intricate Details of Saturn’s Rings Are Revealed in Latest Cassini Images
Like those fractal designs that were so popular in the ’90s Saturn’s rings reveal finer and finer structures the nearer Cassini gets, now in the final year of its mission. Recent images from the spacecraft, captured in December 2016, show groove-like density waves and skyscraper-sized clumps within the planet’s icy rings—and it’s just a hint at what…
Lights in the Dark 