Tag Archive for 'Solar System'

This image from Cassini shows battered terrain around the north pole of Enceladus. Craters crowd and overlap each other, each one recording an impact in the moon’s distant past. The moon’s north pole lies approximately at the top of this image. North on Enceladus is up. The view was acquired at a distance of 4,000 miles (6,000 km) from Enceladus and at a Sun-Enceladus-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 8 degrees. Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / Space Science Institute.

New Close-Up Photos of Saturn’s Moon Enceladus Released by NASA

Oct 18, 2015 by News Staff

NASA scientists have released the best views yet of the northern extremes of Saturn’s moon Enceladus. The images were collected as the agency’s Cassini...

This Pluto mosaic was made from New Horizons LORRI images taken on July 14, 2015, from a distance of 49,700 miles (80,000 km). This view is projected from a point 1,118 miles (1,800 km) above Pluto’s equator, looking northeast over the dark, cratered Cthulhu Regio toward the bright, smooth expanse of icy plains called Sputnik Planum. Pluto’s North Pole is off the image to the left. This mosaic was produced with panchromatic images from the New Horizons LORRI camera, with color overlaid from the Ralph color mapper onboard New Horizons. Image credit: S.A. Stern et al, doi: 10.1126/science.aad1815.

New Horizons Team Releases First Scientific Results from Flyby of Pluto System

Oct 16, 2015 by News Staff

The dwarf planet Pluto displays a wide variety of geological landforms, including those resulting from glaciological and surface-atmosphere interactions...

This global map of Jupiter was made during the Hubble OPAL Program. The map was observed on 19 January 2015, from 2:00 UTC to 12:30 UTC. Image credit: NASA / ESA / A. Simon, GSFC / M. Wong, University of California, Berkeley / G. Orton, JPL-Caltech.

New Global Maps of Jupiter Unveiled

Oct 14, 2015 by News Staff

A team of astronomers from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and the University of California, Berkeley,...

This global digital map of Titan was created using images taken by Cassini’s imaging science subsystem (ISS). The mean radius of Titan used for projection of this map is 1,600 miles (2,575 km). Titan is assumed to be spherical until a control network is created at some point in the future. Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / Space Science Institute.

NASA Releases Updated Maps of Saturn’s Moon Titan

Oct 13, 2015 by News Staff

NASA has released a global digital map of Saturn’s largest moon, Titan, and two polar stereographic maps its northern and southern hemispheres. This...

New Horizons finds water ice on Pluto: the scene is approximately 280 miles (450 km) across. Image credit: NASA / Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory / Southwest Research Institute.

New Horizons Finds Red-Colored Water Ice on Pluto

Oct 12, 2015 by News Staff

Using data from the Ralph spectral composition mapper that flew aboard NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft, planetary researchers have detected water ice...

According to NASA scientists, complex chemical compounds called tholins give Pluto a distinctive blue haze. Image credit: NASA / Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory / Southwest Research Institute.

Latest New Horizons Image Shows Pluto’s ‘Blue Skies’

Oct 9, 2015 by News Staff

NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft has beamed back the first color image of Pluto’s atmosphere. New Horizons looks toward the night side of Pluto and sees...

New Horizons Sends Back New Images of Pluto’s Moons Nix and Hydra

Oct 7, 2015 by News Staff

Nix and Hydra, two of Pluto’s small moons, appear in glorious sharpness in close-up pictures released this week by a New Horizons team member. Nix is...

This impressive view of Charon was captured on July 14, 2015. Charon’s color palette is not as diverse as Pluto’s; most striking is the reddish north (top) polar region, informally named Mordor Macula. Image credit: NASA / Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory / Southwest Research Institute.

NASA’s New Horizons Team Releases High Resolution View of Charon

Oct 1, 2015 by News Staff

This high-resolution ‘extended color’ view of the Pluto-facing hemisphere of Charon – taken by New Horizons’ Ralph/Multispectral Visual Imaging...

Rosetta NavCam image taken on 14 March 2015 at 85.7 km from the center of 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko; it has been cleaned to remove the more obvious bad pixels and cosmic ray artefacts, and intensities have been scaled. Image credit: ESA / Rosetta / NAVCAM / CC BY-SA IGO 3.0.

67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko Was Once Two Separate Comets

Sep 30, 2015 by News Staff

According to a new paper in the journal Nature, two comets collided in the early Solar System to give rise to the extraordinary shape of Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. This...

This is a color-coded topographic map of Occator crater. Blue is the lowest elevation, and brown is the highest. Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / UCLA / MPS.

NASA Scientists Release Improved Maps of Dwarf Planet Ceres

Sep 30, 2015 by News Staff

Scientists with NASA’s Dawn mission have released new color-coded maps of Ceres showing the highs and lows of topography on the dwarf planet’s surface...

This high-resolution image of Pluto was taken by New Horizons on July 14. Pluto’s surface sports a remarkable range of subtle colors, enhanced in this view to a rainbow of pale blues, yellows, oranges, and deep reds. Many landforms have their own distinct colors, telling a complex geological and climatological story that scientists have only just begun to decode. Image credit: NASA / Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory / Southwest Research Institute.

NASA Releases New High Resolution Images of Pluto

Sep 25, 2015 by News Staff

NASA’s New Horizons has beamed back its best color picture of the dwarf planet Pluto, as well as other stunning, close-up images of the planet’s surface...

This view of Pluto, based on the latest images to be downlinked from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft, shows what you would see if you were approximately 1,100 miles (1,800 km) above Pluto’s equatorial area, looking northeast over the dark, cratered, named Cthulhu Regio toward the bright, smooth, expanse of icy plains called Sputnik Planum. The entire expanse of terrain seen in this image is 1,100 miles (1,800 km) across. Image credit: NASA / Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory / Southwest Research Institute.

NASA Scientist Creates New Virtual Tour of Pluto

Sep 22, 2015 by News Staff

Dr Stuart Robbins, a New Horizons team member from the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, has produced a new animation/flyover of Pluto...

This panoramic image of Pluto highlights dwarf planet’s varied terrains and extended atmosphere. The scene measures 780 miles (1,250 km) across. The smooth expanse of Sputnik Planum (right) is flanked to the west (left) by rugged mountains up to 11,000 feet (3.5 km) high, including Norgay Montes in the foreground and Hillary Montes on the skyline. To the right, east of Sputnik, rougher terrain is cut by apparent glaciers. The backlighting highlights over a dozen layers of haze in the atmosphere of Pluto. The image was taken from a distance of 11,000 miles (18,000 km) to Pluto. Image credit: NASA / Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory / Southwest Research Institute.

Latest Panoramic Image of Pluto Reveals ‘Arctic-Like’ World

Sep 18, 2015 by News Staff

NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft snapped this remarkable panoramic view of Pluto’s crescent on July 14, 2015. This picture, taken with the spacecraft’s...

This Cassini image shows the night sides of Saturn and Tethys. Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / Space Science Institute.

Cassini Captures Dark Sides of Saturn and Tethys

Sep 17, 2015 by News Staff

This beautiful image from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft shows the night sides of Saturn and its fifth largest moon, Tethys. This Cassini image shows the...

This illustration is a speculative representation of the interior of Enceladus with a global ocean between its rocky core and icy crust. The thickness of layers shown here is not to scale. Scientists determined that the slight wobble of the moon as it orbits Saturn is much too large for the moon to be frozen from surface to core. The wobble, technically referred to as a libration, reveals that the crust of Enceladus is disconnected from its rocky interior. Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech.

Enceladus Harbors Global Subsurface Ocean

Sep 16, 2015 by News Staff

Planetary researchers with NASA’s Cassini mission have found a large body of water beneath the surface of Saturn’s moon Enceladus. This color view...

The dot in the cross-hairs is a comet streaming toward the Sun, as seen on September 14, 2015, by SOHO. This is the 3,000th comet discovered in the data from the space observatory since it launched in 1995, Image credit: NASA / ESA / SOHO.

SOHO Observatory Discovers Its 3,000th Comet

Sep 15, 2015 by News Staff

On Sunday, September 13, the NASA/ESA Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) discovered its 3,000th comet. The dot in the cross-hairs is a comet streaming...

This colorful view of Mercury was produced by using images from the color base map imaging campaign during MESSENGER’s primary mission. These colors are not what Mercury would look like to the human eye, but rather the colors enhance the chemical, mineralogical, and physical differences between the rocks that make up the planet’s surface. Image credit: NASA / Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory / Carnegie Institution of Washington.

Planet Mercury Spins Faster Than Expected

Sep 15, 2015 by News Staff

By analyzing data collected by NASA’s MESSENGER spacecraft, scientists have found that, on average, Mercury spins on its axis 9 seconds faster than had...

This image of Charon, taken by New Horizons ten hours before its closest approach to Pluto on July 14, 2015 from a distance of 290,000 miles (470,000 km), is a recently downlinked, much higher quality version of a Charon image released on July 15. The smallest visible features are 2.9 miles (4.6 km) in size. Image credit: NASA / Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory / Southwest Research Institute.

New Horizons Beams Back New Images of Charon, Pluto’s Small Moons

Sep 15, 2015 by News Staff

NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft has sent back new, better images of Pluto’s largest moon, Charon, and the dwarf planet’s smaller satellites Nix and...

This image from NASA’s Galileo spacecraft shows Io. There are rugged mountains several miles high, layered materials forming plateaus, and many irregular depressions called volcanic calderas. Several of the dark, flow-like features correspond to hot spots, and may be active lava flows. There are no landforms resembling impact craters, as the volcanism covers the surface with new deposits much more rapidly than the flux of comets and asteroids can create large impact craters. The picture is centered on the side of Io that always faces away from Jupiter; north is to the top. Image credit: NASA / JPL / University of Arizona.

Jupiter’s Moon Io May Have Subsurface Magma Ocean

Sep 14, 2015 by News Staff

Io is the Solar System’s most volcanically active planetary body. However, concentrations of volcanic activity are displaced from where they are expected...

New Horizons Sends Back New Close-Up Images of Pluto

Sep 11, 2015 by News Staff

NASA’s New Horizons probe has beamed back new detailed images of Pluto’s surface, revealing icy and mountainous regions. This view of Pluto, based...

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