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Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2011/04/19 01:03 CDT
Some recent photos that Cassini took from a position nearly in Saturn's shadow caught my eye, and I made a quick color composite. What an amazing view this would be if you were riding on the spacecraft!
Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2011/04/19 11:21 CDT
When Mariner 10 flew past Mercury, it caught an immense impact basin lying half in and half out of sunlight, which they named Caloris. Even with only half the basin visible, scientists knew it was one of the largest in the solar system. Geologists had to wait more than 25 years to see the rest of Caloris, and when they did it turned out to be even bigger than they had thought. But the fact that Caloris was only half in sunlight was fortuitous in one sense, because it meant that the spot on Mercury that was exactly opposite the area of the Caloris impact was also partially in sunlight. That spot looks weird.
Lots of great stuff in the latest Cassini data release
Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2011/04/13 04:56 CDT
I've got some lovely pictures from Saturn to show you! Every three months, the Cassini mission dumps gigabytes worth of precious Saturn data into the Planetary Data System, and the latest gift came on April 1. This particular pile of data, which was taken between April 1 and June 30, 2010, contains a lot of really terrific moon observations.
Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2011/04/08 12:03 CDT
The photo I took of Curiosity's "face" and posted on Monday seems to have tickled a lot of people. I understand it's the subject of a "Photoshop this Mars rover" challenge at Fark, and a couple of the guys over at unmannedspaceflight.com have been having a field day with it.
Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2011/04/01 03:08 CDT
Here's a photo worthy of hanging on the wall: a gorgeous, 4000-pixel-square portrait of the full Moon captured by Rolf Hempel from Germany on the night of the "Supermoon."
Saturn's storm: A quick turnaround from Hubble
Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2011/03/28 04:13 CDT
Saturn's raging northern storm has been watched since it began by amateur astronomers, and now Cassini is getting in to the act too. Presumably once astronomers realized the magnitude of what was going on, some of Earth's great observatories were also occasionally pointed at the ringed planet to watch the storm grow.
Checking in on Jupiter: the belt is coming back
Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2011/03/25 03:46 CDT
Since it's been several months since I last took a look at Jupiter, I thought it was time to see what's up with the South Equatorial Belt.
LPSC 2011: Wanted: Pioneer 10 & 11 digital data
Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2011/03/11 01:39 CST
This is both a Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (LPSC) update and a public service announcement. Ted Stryk has been working for years to locate the original Pioneer 10 and 11 image data from the Jupiter and Saturn encounters.
Pretty picture: Viking 1 across Mars
Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2011/03/09 10:10 CST
Image magician Daniel Macháček has been turning his energies to Viking Orbiter views of Mars lately, with some stunning results, like the one below. I'm not sure how he makes images that look so sharp and clean and with such rich color out of the Viking Orbiter data.
Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2011/03/08 10:46 CST
To relieve this week's text-heavy LPSC posts, here's a brief one on an incredible panorama across Saturn's northern storm, taken on February 26 by Cassini and assembled by unmannedspaceflight.com member "Astro0."
The Solar System from the Inside Out - and the Outside In
Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2011/02/18 02:27 CST
Space probes grant us perspective, the ability to see our place within the vastness of the solar system. But opportunities to see all of the solar system's planets in one observation are rare. In fact, there's only been one opportunity on one mission to see the whole solar system at once, until now.
Happy Valentine's Day from Mars
Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2011/02/14 01:35 CST
I dug around and found something unique: this cool heart-shaped feature on Mars -- my Valentine to you all!
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.
Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2011/01/31 03:14 CST
Here's an image I've been meaning to post for months, a new mosaic from Voyager 1 by Ted Stryk of Io crossing Jupiter's terminator as it neared closest approach.
Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2011/01/28 09:21 CST
In the past week there have been 25th anniversaries of two events in 1986, one great, one terrible: the closest approach of Voyager 2 to Uranus on January 24, and the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger upon liftoff on January 28.
Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2011/01/27 05:32 CST
I've spent the day noodling around in the current issue of Icarus, following up some of the more interesting stories within its table of contents, and came across a picture of this very cool crater -- actually, set of craters -- on Mars.
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.
Mars Express' January 2011 Phobos images show how camera works
Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2011/01/21 05:09 CST
The Mars Express High-Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) team has just released several images from the most recent series of Phobos flybys to the Mars Express blog.
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.
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