Blog Archive

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.

The International Space Station (May 2010)

One-astronaut game of baseball in the International Space Station

Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2011/12/01 07:18 CST

A fun video of Japanese astronaut Satoshi Furukawa playing baseball aboard the ISS.

Dawn artist's concept orbiting asteroid Vesta

Dawn Journal: Riding gravitational currents to LAMO

Posted by Marc Rayman on 2011/12/01 04:05 CST

In this update on the Dawn mission, project system engineer Marc Rayman reports that the probe is headed for its low altitude mapping orbit (LAMO), where it will focus on making a census of the atomic constituents and on mapping the gravity field in order to determine Vesta's interior structure.

Every round object in the solar system, to scale (widescreen)

At last, I've finished my scale solar system presentation slide/poster

Posted by Emily Lakdawalla on 2011/12/01 01:22 CST

A presentation providing a correctly scaled, reasonably correctly colored view of the largest bodies in the solar system is made available for use by teachers, professors, and informal educators.