Category Archives: Space Science

Videos: Marvelous views of Jupiter, the Moon, the Sun, and aurora borealis

Check out the big collection of vidoes created by Seán Doran showing beautiful space imagery. Here is a sampling:

** Imagery of Jupiter taken during the Juno probe‘s ninth orbit is viewed with the music of the ‘Orphic Hymn’ by Jóhann Jóhannsson. Performed by the Theatre of Voices:

** The surface of the Moon as seen by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter to the music of ‘Lux Aeterna’ by György Ligeti:

** Aurora over Canada as seen from the ISS:

** One month of sun in a three minute time-lapse:

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Cassini’s farewell mosaic of Saturn

The Cassini probe was sent to its doom in the Saturn atmosphere back in September but images and data will be arriving from its mission to the ringed planet for years to come. Here is a recent NASA JPL posting about a wonderful view of Saturn created form Cassini images:

Cassini Image Mosaic: A Farewell to Saturn

After more than 13 years at Saturn, and with its fate sealed, NASA’s Cassini spacecraft bid farewell to the Saturnian system by firing the shutters of its wide-angle camera and capturing this last, full mosaic of Saturn and its rings two days before the spacecraft’s dramatic plunge into the planet’s atmosphere. NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute › Full image and caption

In a fitting farewell to the planet that had been its home for over 13 years, the Cassini spacecraft took one last, lingering look at Saturn and its splendid rings during the final leg of its journey and snapped a series of images that has been assembled into a new mosaic.

Cassini’s wide-angle camera acquired 42 red, green and blue images, covering the planet and its main rings from one end to the other, on Sept. 13, 2017. Imaging scientists stitched these frames together to make a natural color view. The scene also includes the moons Prometheus, Pandora, Janus, Epimetheus, Mimas and Enceladus.

There is much to remember and celebrate in marking the end of the mission. Cassini’s exploration of Saturn and its environs was deep, comprehensive and historic.

“Cassini’s scientific bounty has been truly spectacular — a vast array of new results leading to new insights and surprises, from the tiniest of ring particles to the opening of new landscapes on Titan and Enceladus, to the deep interior of Saturn itself,”

said Robert West, Cassini’s deputy imaging team leader at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

The Cassini imaging team had been planning this special farewell view of Saturn for years. For some, when the end finally came, it was a difficult goodbye.

“It was all too easy to get used to receiving new images from the Saturn system on a daily basis, seeing new sights, watching things change,” said Elizabeth Turtle, an imaging team associate at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, Laurel, Maryland. “It was hard to say goodbye, but how lucky we were to be able to see it all through Cassini’s eyes!”

For others, Cassini’s farewell to Saturn is reminiscent of another parting from long ago.

“For 37 years, Voyager 1’s last view of Saturn has been, for me, one of the most evocative images ever taken in the exploration of the solar system,” said Carolyn Porco, former Voyager imaging team member and Cassini’s imaging team leader at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado. “In a similar vein, this ‘Farewell to Saturn’ will forevermore serve as a reminder of the dramatic conclusion to that wondrous time humankind spent in intimate study of our Sun’s most iconic planetary system.”

Launched in 1997, the Cassini spacecraft orbited Saturn from 2004 to 2017. The mission made numerous dramatic discoveries, including the surprising geologic activity on Saturn’s moon Enceladus and liquid methane seas on Saturn’s largest moon, Titan. Cassini ended its journey with a dramatic plunge into Saturn’s atmosphere on Sept. 15, 2017, returning unique science data until it lost contact with Earth.

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, ESA (European Space Agency) and the Italian Space Agency. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of Caltech in Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, Washington. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging team consists of scientists from the U.S., England, France, and Germany. The imaging operations center and team leader are based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado.

More information about Cassini:

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Juno: A marvelous image of a giant Jovian storm

The Juno probe orbiting Jupiter captures this image (color-enhanced) of a grand storm in the northern hemisphere of the gas giant:

Jovian Tempest

This color-enhanced image of a massive, raging storm in Jupiter’s northern hemisphere was captured by NASA’s Juno spacecraft during its ninth close flyby of the gas giant planet.

The image was taken on Oct. 24, 2017 at 10:32 a.m. PDT (1:32 p.m. EDT). At the time the image was taken, the spacecraft was about 6,281 miles (10,108 kilometers) from the tops of the clouds of Jupiter at a latitude of 41.84 degrees. The spatial scale in this image is 4.2 miles/pixel (6.7 kilometers/pixel).

The storm is rotating counter-clockwise with a wide range of cloud altitudes. The darker clouds are expected to be deeper in the atmosphere than the brightest clouds. Within some of the bright “arms” of this storm, smaller clouds and banks of clouds can be seen, some of which are casting shadows to the right side of this picture (sunlight is coming from the left). The bright clouds and their shadows range from approximately 4 to 8 miles (7 to 12 kilometers) in both widths and lengths. These appear similar to the small clouds in other bright regions Juno has detected and are expected to be updrafts of ammonia ice crystals possibly mixed with water ice.

Citizen scientists Gerald Eichstädt and Seán Doran processed this image using data from the JunoCam imager.

More information about Juno is online at http://www.nasa.gov/juno and http://missionjuno.swri.edu.

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Video: Planetary Post with Robert Picardo – “It Came From Planet 9”

The latest Planetary Post with Robert Picardo, sponsored by the Planetary Society, is now available: It Came From Planet 9 

Picardo is the Phantom of the Orbit in this spooky episode of The Planetary Post for Halloween. Enjoy a special guest visit from Dr. Konstantin Batygin, one of the members of the team which has theorized a big, ninth planet way out beyond Neptune.

 

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