This bumpy wrinkled pucker is actually an enormous ice volcano — i.e., a cryovolcano — on the surface of Pluto, imaged by the passing New Horizons spacecraft on July 14, 2015. Informally called Wright Mons, the feature is about 90 miles (150 km) across and 2.5 miles (4 km) high, about as high as some of the tallest…
Tag: volcano
Boom! Io Explodes With Volcanic Eruptions Hundreds of Miles High
Three enormous volcanic eruptions on Jupiter’s moon Io were witnessed by scientists last year using the Keck II and Gemini telescopes in Hawaii. The only other confirmed volcanically-active world in the solar system besides Earth, Io is constantly being resurfaced by eruptions and lava flows, due to internal heat and pressures caused by tidal stresses as a…
Grimsvotn GOES Boom
Watch as a huge cloud of ash bursts into the upper atmosphere from Iceland’s Grímsvötn volcano in this sequence of images taken by NASA’s GOES-13 weather observation satellite. The oblique angle of illumination and position along the edge of the globe emphasizes the incredible vertical scale of the eruption. (Click to play.) Grímsvötn erupted on…
iseefaces…on the Moon!
This mound – with craters positioned facelike on its top, including a central peak crater – is located along the edge of the Moon’s Eddington crater, an ancient lava-filled basin on the central western limb. Imaged by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter in January, this 1.5km-wide mound may be the remnants of a volcano. Or it…
Focus!
At first glance it may seem as if the University of Arizona’s HiRISE camera needs a little focus adjustment. But notice the few scattered little impact craters and dune ripples in this image and you’ll realize there’s nothing wrong with the focus—it’s the surface of Mars that’s blurry here!
Bottomless Pit?
Not really, but it sure seems like it! A 900-foot-wide hole in the Tractus Fossae region of Mars drops down into blackness in this photo by the HiRISE camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter…it looks like an entrance to a cave or “bottomless pit” but is actually just a very steep-walled depression, formed by…
Lights in the Dark 