On December 5th, at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco, scientists unveiled an unprecedented new look at our planet at night. A global composite image, constructed using cloud-free night images from a new NASA and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) satellite, shows the glow of natural and human-built phenomena across Earth in greater detail than ever before.… Read the rest of this article
Twin NASA probes orbiting Earth’s moon have generated the highest resolution gravity field map of any celestial body.
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This movie shows the variations in the lunar gravity field as measured by NASA’s Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) during the primary mapping mission from March to May 2012. Very precise microwave measurements between two spacecraft, named Ebb and Flow, were …
NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft has entered a new region at the far reaches of our solar system that scientists feel is the final area the spacecraft has to cross before reaching interstellar space.
Scientists refer to this new region as a magnetic highway for charged particles because our sun’s magnetic field lines are connected to interstellar magnetic field lines. This … Read the rest of this article
NASA’s Mars Curiosity rover has used its full array of instruments to analyze Martian soil for the first time, and found a complex chemistry within the Martian soil. Water and sulfur and chlorine-containing substances, among other ingredients, showed up in samples Curiosity’s arm delivered to an analytical laboratory inside the rover.
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This is a view of the third (left) and …
Six years of observations by ESA’s Venus Express have shown large changes in the sulphur dioxide content of the planet’s atmosphere, and one intriguing possible explanation is volcanic eruptions.
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Artist’s impression of an active volcano on Venus. Results from a long-term study of Venus find evidence of a clear injection of sulphur dioxide into its upper atmosphere. One possible interpretation …
Now you see it, now you don’t. Douglas Clowe of Ohio University in Athens, Ohio, is reporting on new Hubble observations that do not find an unusually dense clump of dark matter in the universe that a different Hubble team reported on earlier this year.
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These composite images, taken by two different teams using the Hubble Space Telescope, show different …
Nearly 65 feet beneath the icy surface of a remote Antarctic lake, scientists from NASA, the Desert Research Institute (DRI) in Reno, Nev., the University of Illinois at Chicago, and nine other institutions, have uncovered a community of bacteria existing in one of Earth’s darkest, saltiest and coldest habitats.
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Scanning electron micrograph of very small and numerous bacterial cells inhabiting …
A stunning array of images of our home planet, taken by Earth-observing science satellites, are featured in a new NASA publication. The book, “Earth as Art,” is available in hardcover, electronically, and as a free iPad application.
The 158-page book celebrates the aesthetic beauty of Earth in the patterns, shapes, colors and textures of the land, oceans, ice and atmosphere. … Read the rest of this article
After two decades of satellite observations, an international team of experts brought together by ESA and NASA has produced the most accurate assessment of ice losses from Antarctica and Greenland to date. This study finds that the combined rate of ice sheet melting is increasing.
The new research shows that melting of the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets has added … Read the rest of this article
New data from NASA’s MESSENGER spacecraft suggest that there’s enough ice on Mercury to encase the entire US capitol.
“The new data indicate the water ice in Mercury’s polar regions, if spread over an area the size of Washington, D.C., would be more than 2 miles thick,” said David Lawrence, a MESSENGER participating scientist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied … 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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