If You Like Pluto, Put a Ring on It
Hubble image of Pluto and its four known moons. NASA, ESA, and M. Showalter (SETI Institute)
NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft is currently speeding through the outer solar system toward its July 2015 date with Pluto, when it will take a good close look at the dwarf planet’s mysterious surface, atmosphere, moons, and… rings?
Less than three-quarters the size of our moon, Pluto nevertheless has no shortage of fascinating features. It has a curiously mottled coloration that seems to change with its seasons, an atmosphere that expands and falls back onto its surface, a system of four moons in orbit around it — the most recent of which, currently called “P4″, was announced just last summer — and, according to Planetary Science Institute senior scientist Henry Throop, possibly even a system of rings.
Hey, at this point… why not?
Read the rest of this article on National Geographic News Watch here.
Hello, Earth!
NASA satellite image of Earth. January 2012
It’s the 2012 version of the “Blue Marble“! Here’s an amazing new high-definition portrait of our planet, made by NASA’s Suomi NPP satellite launched back on October 28. This is a composite image created from multiple scans taken with the satellite’s Visible/Infrared Imager Radiometer Suite (VIIRS).
The Suomi NPP satellite. Click for animation.
Suomi NPP is the first satellite designed to collect critical data to improve short-term weather forecasts and increase understanding of long-term climate change. It orbits Earth about 14 times each day and observes nearly the entire surface.
Learn more about the Suomi NPP satellite here.
Credit: NASA/NOAA/GSFC/Suomi NPP/VIIRS/Norman Kuring
Solar Storm in Progress!
Yesterday’s solar flare sent out a huge cloud of charged solar particles our way, and this afternoon it impacted our magnetosphere… sparking a brilliant display of aurorae in northern skies such as those above the Aurora Sky Station in Abisko, Sweden.
Time For Some Stormy Solar Weather!
Powerful M8.7-class flare from active region 1402 seen by SDO on Jan. 23, 2012.
Any lapse in solar activity we may have seen during this period of “solar maximum” came to an end this weekend with some very energetic flares and CMEs, including the one seen above: an M8.7-class flare spotted by NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) at 3:49 UT this morning.
This comes just 4 days after a strong CME sent a cloud of charged solar particles Earthward on Jan. 19, which impacted our magnetosphere on the afternoon of the 22nd, causing brilliant displays of aurorae around the northern latitudes. (See a gallery of aurora photos on Universe Today.)
Today’s flare has the potential of causing the largest solar storm experienced on Earth since 2005… in addition to more aurorae in the coming nights, some electromagnetic interference may occur.
An Orbital View Over Africa (VIDEO)
Can’t see the video below? Click here.
One of the latest uploads to the Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth site, this short-but-oh-so-sweet video shows the view from the Space Station as it passes over Africa, Madagascar and the southern Indian Ocean at night on December 29, 2011. Multiple lightning storms flash over Africa while the Milky Way rises majestically behind the thin line of Earth’s atmosphere, capped by a greenish layer of airglow. Also making an appearance is Comet Lovejoy, at the time two weeks after its near-fatal sunburn. It can be made out rising near the Milky Way’s right side, its faint tail vertical.
A View From The Top
Photo taken from the ISS on Nov. 24, 2011. (NASA)
From the top of the atmosphere, that is! This gorgeous photo, taken from the Space Station on November 24, 2011, looks over our planet’s limb just after orbital sunset. We get a good look at cloud structures, the thin shell of our atmosphere (it’s always surprising how thin it really is), airglow, stars, and what looks like – I may be mistaken – zodiacal light, which is sunlight reflecting off dust particles orbiting within the plane of our solar system. Add to that a bit of the ISS itself peeking into the foreground, and we have quite an impressive photo here!
The ISS was positioned about 240 miles above the International Date Line over the North Pacific, looking west (and traveling its usual 17,500 mph) when this photo was taken.
“The one thing I think that I really took away from just the experience of looking down and up is that, first, our atmosphere is extraordinarily thin. You look at the edge of this Earth, and you see this razor-thin band of air that surrounds this giant rock in space, and it gives you a newfound respect for how much we need to take care of this very thin little atmosphere we have.”
– STS-135 Commander Chris Ferguson
From the LITD Archives: Eclipsing Mimas
Originally published on May 16, 2009. LITD is almost 3 years old!
A Shadow Crosses the Face of Mimas
This animation, made from a series of 8 raw images taken by Cassini on May 14, shows Saturn’s moon Mimas being eclipsed by another object…..a neighboring moon, perhaps? It’s not mentioned, but it definitely seems to be something of similar size, and round.
Mimas is best characterized by its large-scale Herschel crater in its northern hemisphere. At 88 miles wide, it is a major surface feature of the 246-mile-wide moon (and pretty much makes it look like a rough version of the Death Star.) Herschel is not visible in these particular images.
It will be interesting to see if this eclipse event is clarified by the Cassini mission team in the future.
Raw image credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute. Animation: J. Major.
Mercury’s “Smooth” Plains
MESSENGER image of Mercury's "smooth" north polar region
Mercury has a vast region of smooth volcanic plains surrounding its northern polar region, wrapping over a third of the way around the planet. But even though the plains are called smooth, they are still characteristically rugged – made obvious in this narrow-angle camera image from MESSEGER acquired December 13.
Being an area close to Mercury’s pole, the incidence angle of sunlight highlights every crater, ridge and rise… showing that “smooth” on Mercury is definitely a relative term!
This image shows an area about 43 miles (70 km) across. Read more on the MESSENGER website here.
Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington
