[CLICK ON IMAGE FOR HIGH RESOLUTION], Ben Cooper Destination: Pluto. The New Horizons spacecraft [atop a powerful Atlas V rocket] roared off its launch pad at Cape Canaveral in Florida, USA in 2006 toward adventures in the distant Solar System. The craft is the fastest spaceships ever launched by humans, having passed the Moon only […]
[CLICK ON IMAGE FOR HIGH RESOLUTION] There’s a near-perfect heart shape on Pluto’s rusty red surface which scientists are seeing for the first time as a piano-sized NASA spacecraft, New Horizons, hurtles toward the distant body on its way toward a historic flyby on July 14. … Pluto [was] once considered the farthest planet in […]
[CLICK ON IMAGE FOR HIGH RESOLUTION. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute] [This is] Dione, and it’s a moon of Saturn. The robotic Cassini spacecraft took the featured image during a flyby of Saturn’s cratered Moon last month. Perhaps what makes this image so interesting, though, is the background. First, the large orb looming behind Dione […]
Kelly Beatty, Sky and Telescope The two brightest planets are gliding closer together in the early evening sky, and their celestial dance culminates with an ultra-close pairing on June 30th. Anyone who pays even cursory attention to the evening sky has surely noticed that the two brightest planets, Venus and Jupiter, have been drawing closer […]
[CLICK ON IMAGE FOR HIGH RESOLUTION / NASA, JPL-Caltech; Mosaic Processing: Marco Di Lorenzo, Kenneth Kremer] Shortly before Mars’ June 2015 conjunction, the Curiosity Rover celebrated 1000 sols on the red planet. After its Aug. 5, 2012 landing, Curiosity’s 1000th sol or martian day on the surface corresponded to planet Earth’s calendar date May 31, […]
[CLICK ON IMAGE FOR HIGH RESOLUTION, Damian Peach/SEN] In this sharp snapshot, the Solar System’s largest moon Ganymede poses next to Jupiter, the largest planet. Captured on March 10 with a small telescope from our fair planet Earth, the scene also includes Jupiter’s Great Red Spot, the Solar System’s largest storm. In fact, Ganymede is […]
[CLICK ON IMAGE FOR HIGH RESOLUTION, Left Image: Damia Bouic; Right Image: NASA, JPL-Caltech] How different does sunset appear from Mars than from Earth? For comparison, two images of our common star were taken at sunset, one from Earth and one from Mars. These images were scaled to have same angular width and featured here […]
NASA claims we’ll find aliens in the next 10 to 20 years – and now the agency is revving up its efforts to track them down. The group has put together a team of ‘extraterrestrial experts’ to see if any of the planets discovered outside our solar system are habitable. …The initiative, dubbed Nexus for […]
[CLICK ON IMAGE FOR HIGH RESOLUTION, Babak Tafreshi (TWAN)] In the coming days, Venus shines near the western horizon at sunset. To find Earth’s sister planet in twilight skies just look for the brilliant evening star. Tonight very close to the Pleiades star cluster, Venus dominates this springtime night skyscape taken only a few days […]
Early on a Saturday morning, about 60 planetary malcontents gathered in a narrow auditorium on the campus of George Washington University. They’d come to hear about a plan to build a self-sustaining colony in space, and they hoped to be among its first settlers, leaving the rest of us to live and die on Earth. […]
