Rosetta is down. I repeat: Rosetta is down. This morning, Sept. 30, 2016, just after 10:39 UTC (6:39 a.m. EDT) ESA’s Rosetta spacecraft ended its mission with an impact onto the surface of the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. The descent, begun with a final burn of its thrusters about 14 hours earlier, was slow, stately, and deliberate, but even…
Tag: solar system
NASA Readies OSIRIS-REx to Visit an Asteroid
NASA is about to embark on its first mission to sample an asteroid—and I’ll have a front-row seat to the launch! On Thursday, Sept. 8, at 7:05 p.m. (23:05 UTC) the launch window opens for the launch of OSIRIS-REx, NASA’s mission to visit the near-Earth asteroid Bennu, orbit and map it, collect a sample and…
Juno Sends Back Its First Pictures of Jupiter’s North Pole; “Like Nothing We Have Seen Before”
Thanks to NASA’s Juno spacecraft we now have our best views yet of the north pole of our Solar System’s largest planet and they’re “hardly recognizable as Jupiter” according to the mission’s lead scientist!
Watch Saturn’s Moons Race Inside the Rings
Round and round they go… the animation above, made from 14 raw images taken by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft on August 23, 2016, shows the moons Prometheus and Atlas orbiting Saturn within the Roche Division gap between its A (top right) and F (center) rings. The gravitational tug of Prometheus (92 miles / 148 km long) is strong…
Watch Juno’s Arrival at Majestic Jupiter, Moons and All
We are the stewards of over 400 years of scientific exploration of our Solar System, which it could be said began in earnest when Galileo Galilei first observed the motions of Jupiter’s moons in his homemade telescope in 1610. Over the centuries our knowledge—and our curiosity—about the seemingly endless variety of worlds in the Solar System…
Juno Just Hours from Jupiter Arrival
After nearly 5 years of traveling through space NASA’s Juno spacecraft is just a few dozen hours away from entering orbit around Jupiter, the Solar System’s largest, most massive, and most extreme planet. “We are ready,” said Scott Bolton, principal investigator of Juno from the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI). “The science team is incredibly excited…
Icy Nix Indicates Pluto’s Moons Are Leftovers From a KBO Collision
Recent findings from the New Horizons team reveal that Pluto’s third-largest satellite Nix is covered in the purest water ice yet observed in the dwarf planet system, even purer in spectra than what was seen on its slightly larger sibling Hydra. This analysis further supports the hypothesis that Pluto’s moons were created in an impact event…
New Planet and Pluto Stamps Available Today!
They’re here and they’re from outer space! The U.S. Postal Service has two new sets of Forever® stamps based on NASA’s exploration of the Solar System: the Views of Our Planets and Pluto—Explored! series, both of which become available for purchase on May 31, 2016. Designed by Antonio Alcalá, the Views of Our Planets stamps feature…
Dawn Sees Landslides and a Central Ridge in a Young Crater on Ceres
Ceres’ Haulani Crater, with a diameter of 21 miles (34 km), shows evidence of landslides from its crater rim. Smooth material and a central ridge stand out on its floor. This image was made using data from NASA’s Dawn spacecraft when it was in its high-altitude mapping orbit, at a distance of 915 miles (1,470…
Enceladus’ Jets: the Farther They Are, the Harder They Spray
A crowning achievement of the Cassini mission to Saturn is the discovery of water vapor jets spraying out from Enceladus‘ southern pole. First witnessed by the spacecraft in 2005, these icy geysers propelled the little 320-mile-wide moon into the scientific spotlight. After 22 flybys of Enceladus during its nearly twelve years in orbit around Saturn, Cassini has gathered enough data to determine…
A New Moon is Discovered in the Solar System
Turns out there is something new under the Sun, at least to us; on Tuesday, April 26 scientists announced the discovery of a new moon in the Solar System—but it’s not around Earth, or Jupiter, or Saturn, or any of the planets that you’ve long been familiar with. This new moon is orbiting a distant world even…
Europa’s Icy Crust May Be Warmer Than We Thought
All the worlds may be ours except Europa but that only makes the ice-covered moon of Jupiter all the more intriguing. Beneath Europa’s thin crust of ice lies a tantalizing global ocean of liquid water somewhere in the neighborhood of 100 kilometers deep—which adds up to more liquid water than is on the entire surface of the Earth. Liquid…
Lights in the Dark 