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First-ever high-resolution Synthetic Aperture Radar image of Enceladus
Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2011/12/01 07:22 CST
On the November 6, 2011 flyby of Enceladus -- the third such flyby in just a few weeks -- the Cassini mission elected to take a SAR swath instead of using the optical instruments for once. So here it is: the first-ever SAR swath on Enceladus. In fact, the only other places we've ever done SAR imaging are Earth, the Moon, Venus, Iapetus, and Titan.
Pretty pictures: Dancing moons
Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2011/09/28 12:28 CDT
Pretty pictures: Dancing moons
Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2011/09/16 08:44 CDT
Video: Zooming around Vesta
The Making of Martian Clouds in Motion: Part 1, working with Mars Express HRSC data
Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2011/08/22 08:39 CDT
The Making of Martian Clouds in Motion: Part 1, working with Mars Express HRSC data
Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2011/08/12 12:52 CDT
Amateur astronomer Patrick Wiggins sent me this neat little animation of comet Garradd moving against background stars through an hour's worth of observing. I'm not any kind of astronomer but if I were I think I would get a kick out of looking at things that appear to move within one night of watching -- asteroids, comets, Jupiter's spots. I'm impatient that way.
Pretty picture: five moons for Cassini
Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2011/08/03 09:57 CDT
Explaining how to combine the red, green and blue images from a recent Cassini image session containing five of Saturn's moons: Janus, Pandora, Enceladus, Mimas and Rhea.
Vesta does a Hyperion impression
Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2011/07/21 06:25 CDT
Maybe it's my own peculiar variant of pareidolia, but every time I see a new image of Vesta I'm reminded of some different other lumpy body in the solar system. In the image released just now by the Dawn team, taken from 10,500 kilometers away, I'm seeing Hyperion.
Cassini animations: Rhea and Dione and Titan
Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2011/06/28 04:12 CDT
I've been mucking about in the Cassini data archives (as I often do when procrastinating) and unearthed a neat, if short, mutual event sequence of two crescent moons passing by each other.
Cassini finally catches Helene
Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2011/06/20 04:41 CDT
Cassini finally catches Helene
Some recent pictures of Saturn's northern storm
Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2011/02/07 04:35 CST
There is a huge storm that's spreading across so much of Saturn that it's been readily visible even from Earth-based telescopes. Over the past couple of days a couple of new images of Saturn have appeared that show just how enormous the storm is today.
Animation of Phobos rotating from recent Mars Express flyby images
Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2011/01/25 10:18 CST
Daniel Macháček has colorized some terrific images of Phobos and run them through some morphing software to make a seamless animation that appears to show Phobos rotating before you.
Two fine color Cassini animations: Prometheus rotating, Tethys and Dione dancing
Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2011/01/20 11:23 CST
Daniel Macháček has reached into the dark side of Prometheus and pulled out an incredible amount of detail where the potato-shaped moon is illuminated by Saturnshine. He produced an animation that morphs among the three sets of four-filter color images that Cassini snapped during the flyby.
2010 JL33: How to see an asteroid from quite a long way away
Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2011/01/13 11:42 CST
A terrific set of Goldstone radar images of a good-sized near-Earth asteroids named 2010 JL33 was posted to the JPL website yesterday. They also posted a movie version but something about these pixelated radar image series absolutely begs for them to be displayed as an old-school animated GIF, so I made one.
Solar eclipses from space: Hinode and SDO
Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2011/01/06 11:33 CST
Two spacecraft that keep their ever-watchful eyes on the Sun -- NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) and JAXA's Hinode -- were doing their thing, when something large wandered past: the Moon.
Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2011/01/05 11:38 CST
These two movies were posted to the JPL website a couple of weeks ago, and they are just amazing.
How Mars Express' orbit shifts with time
Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2011/01/04 11:02 CST
While I was writing yesterday's blog entry on Mars Express' Phobos flybys I realized that I didn't understand Mars Express' orbit very well. So I sent an inquiry to the Mars Express blog, which they answered in a blog entry today.
Mars Express animation of Phobos' shadow transiting Mars
Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2010/02/02 12:08 CST
For the first time ever, Mars Express' Visual Monitoring Camera has imaged the shadow of Mars' moon Phobos crossing the surface of Mars.
Odyssey's going to start listening for Phoenix
Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2010/01/11 05:26 CST
Odyssey's going to start listening for Phoenix
Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2010/01/11 02:01 CST
This description of asteroid 2867 Steins is based upon an article published in the January 8, 2010 issue of Science by H. Uwe Keller and numerous coauthors and on a related press release.
Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2010/01/08 01:08 CST
It's been two months, now, that extrication efforts have been going on. It's discouraging that the Mars Exploration Rover Spirit isn't out of the trap.
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