Color and black-and-white images of Earth taken by two NASA interplanetary spacecraft on July 19 show our planet and its moon as bright beacons from millions of miles away in space.
NASA’s Cassini spacecraft captured the color images of Earth and the moon from its perch in the Saturn system nearly 900 million miles (1.5 billion kilometers) away. MESSENGER, the … Read the rest of this article
33 years ago, a seminal cosmology series hit TV screens. That was the PBS produced Cosmos series hosted by Carl Sagan. If you’re under 30, you may not even have heard of it.
Thirteen powerful episodes took the viewer from the edge of the Universe down to planet Earth and various characters who have changed or influenced the history of … Read the rest of this article
First it was fresh toboggan tracks on Mars, now it’s evidence that it snowed there, albeit a billion years ago.
Rather than water bubbling up from the ground or raining down in drops, a new study based on Hawaiian precipitation patterns supports the idea that the water came down as snow and then melted and ran off to create the … Read the rest of this article
On Wednesday (July 24), some cautiously optimistic news from the team attempting to recover NASA’s stricken Kepler space telescope was announced.
The recovery effort, which began last week, has gotten as far as checking out both of the telescope’s failed reaction control wheels, part the observatory’s critical pointing system.
Kepler has four reaction wheels and needs at least two … Read the rest of this article
A complicated, high-altitude test Wednesday demonstrated NASA’s new Orion spacecraft could land safely even if one of its parachutes failed.
The 10th in a series of evaluations to check out the Orion multipurpose crew vehicle’s parachute system dropped the test capsule from a C-17 aircraft at its highest altitude yet, 35,000 feet above the Arizona desert. One of three massive … Read the rest of this article
Astronomers using NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope have observed what most likely are strong carbon dioxide emissions from Comet ISON ahead of its anticipated pass through the inner solar system later this year.
Images captured June 13 with Spitzer’s Infrared Array Camera indicate carbon dioxide is slowly and steadily “fizzing” away from the so-called “soda-pop comet,” along with dust, in a … Read the rest of this article
Glide through part of the largest canyon on Mars, Valles Marineris, in this stunning colour movie from ESA’s Mars Express.
Valles Marineris is not just the largest canyon on Mars, but at 4000 km long, 200 km wide and 10 km deep it is the largest in the entire Solar System.
The movie focuses on an enclosed 8 km-deep trough … Read the rest of this article
Consider it the first interplanetary photobomb. On July 19th, NASA’s Cassini spacecraft will photograph Earth through the rings of Saturn–and NASA wants you to jump into the shot.
“Cassini has photographed Earth before, but this will be the first time Earthlings know in advance their picture will be taken from a billion miles away,” says Linda Spilker, Cassini project scientist … Read the rest of this article
Across the world, children fall asleep under the faint light from glow-in-the-dark astronomy stickers. Though undeniably adorable, these ceiling planetariums are too jam-packed to be realistic. You’d never see stars, dozens of spiral galaxies, and comets all at the same time, all shining together from the same patch of sky. Unless, of course, you had Hubble.
On April 30, NASA’s … Read the rest of this article
With the help of rover Curiosity, we now know that ancient Mars had large quantities of liquid water flowing across its surface. However, evidence for large bodies of water — i.e. oceans — has been hard to come by. But using high-resolution orbital data, Caltech scientists now think they’ve found a long-dry river delta that once flowed into a … Read the rest of this article
The Sun Now (Visible light)
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The Sun Now (H-Alpha light)
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Aurora Oval
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Aurora Oval
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