[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 […]
[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, 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 […]
[CLICK ON IMAGE FOR HIGH RESOLUTION, Image Credit & Copyright: Dani Caxete] What’s that in front of the Moon? It’s the International Space Station. Using precise timing, the Earth-orbiting space platform was photographed in front of a partially lit Moon last year. The featured image was taken from Madrid, Spain with an exposure time of […]
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 […]
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. […]
[CLICK ON IMAGE FOR HIGH RESOLUTION, NASA, Bill Ingalls] Thursday, March 12, shortly after local sunrise over central Asia, this Soyuz spacecraft floated over a sea of golden clouds during its descent by parachute through planet Earth’s dense atmosphere. On board were Expedition 42 commander Barry Wilmore of NASA and Alexander Samokutyaev and Elena Serova […]
[CLICK ON IMAGE FOR HIGH RESOLUTION, HiRISE, MRO, LPL (U. Arizona), NASA] It was late in the northern martian spring when the HiRISE camera onboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter spied this local denizen. Tracking across the flat, dust-covered Amazonis Planitia in 2012, the core of this whirling dust devil is about 140 meters in diameter. […]
[CLICK ON IMAGE FOR HIGH RESOLUTION, NASA, ESA, Hubble] The Coma Cluster of Galaxies pictured above is one of the densest clusters known – it contains thousands of galaxies. Each of these galaxies houses billions of stars – just as our own Milky Way Galaxy does. Although nearby when compared to most other clusters, light […]
