UPDATE: Today is the second launch attempt for the Red Bull Stratos “Mission to the Edge of Space.” Regardless if you would do it or not, today Red Bull Stratos BASE jumper Felix Baumgartner will ride a high-tech pressurized capsule into the stratosphere and jump out at 120,000 feet — 22 miles/36 km — becoming…
Tag: space
Blue Marble, Pale Blue Dot…whatever you call it, it’s Home
35 years ago today, September 18, 1977, NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft turned its camera homeward just about two weeks after its launch, capturing the image above from a distance of 7.25 million miles (11.66 million km). It was the first time an image of its kind had ever been taken, showing the entire Earth and Moon together…
Cassini Peeks at Titan’s Southern Vortex
A color-composite image of Titan shows Saturn’s largest moon in true color, including its recently-discovered southern vortex forming above its south pole. The image was assembled from three raw images acquired on August 28 by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft in red, green and blue visible light color channels. The background was extended in size to better…
Goodbye, Earth!
If you haven’t seen this before, you’re probably not alone. It’s a video made from a series of several hundred images acquired by NASA’s MESSENGER spacecraft as it swung past Earth, departing forever on its journey to Mercury on August 2, 2005 — just a day shy of one year after its launch. Many blogs…
Remembering Sojourner, the First Mars Rover
The Mars Pathfinder mission, launched on Dec. 4, 1996, was designed to demonstrate a low-cost method for delivering a set of science instruments to Mars and sent the first wheeled vehicle to be used on another planet. The mission served as the foundation for all future Mars rovers. Although I eagerly followed the exciting news…
Soaring Over a Shadow: An Eclipse Seen From Space
The May 20 annular eclipse, seen by many around the world as a “ring of fire” in the sky, was also seen by the astronauts aboard the ISS — although they also got a great view of the shadow that the Moon cast on the Earth as well! This HD video, a time-lapse made from…
To The Moon! Apollo 11 Liftoff (HD Video)
On this day, July 16, in 1969, a Saturn V rocket — still the most powerful rocket ever built — launched Apollo 11 on its historic journey to take astronauts Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins to the Moon — the first two becoming the first humans to ever step foot on another world…
Why It’s So Hard To Date a Crater
The 13-mile (21-km) wide Giordano Bruno crater on the Moon’s far side was recently imaged by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter at an angle at a time when the setting sun cast long shadows, creating the high-relief image seen above. It’s known that the brightly-rayed crater is relatively young (see the video below) but how young?…
Hit The Slopes!
Things on the Moon don’t always stay put, as the tracks left by these large boulders show!
The Colors of Titan and Saturn
The pumpkin-orange colors of Titan’s thick clouds appear in stark contrast in front of the limb of Saturn, which appears quite blue along its sunlit limb due to Rayleigh scattering, the same process that makes the sky look blue here on Earth. The image here is a color composite made from three separate raw images…
More Evidence for Titan’s Underground Ocean
As Titan travels around Saturn during its 16-day elliptical orbits, it gets rhythmically squeezed by the gravitational pull of the giant planet — an effect known as tidal flexing. Now, if this cloud-covered moon were mostly composed of rock, the flexing would be in the neighborhood of around 3 feet (1 meter.) But based on measurements…
High-Flying Ice Clouds Spotted From Space
Glowing high-altitude ice clouds were spotted over western Asia by the crew of the International Space Station on June 13 during one of their 16 daily orbits of the planet… the photo above shows the wispy filaments shining brightly in the mesosphere above western Iraq and Uzbekistan. Read the rest of this article here.
Lights in the Dark 