Here is Robert Picardo with his monhtly Planetary Post video:
Bill Nye celebrates the total solar eclipse of 2017 at Homestead National Monument as part of our partnership with the U.S. National Parks and Picardo has a very special goodbye song for the Cassini Mission.
More space science video: Cassini: A Saturn Odyssey
** [The video Jupiter’s Great Red Spot Timelapse was removed for some reason from YouTube. In its place is a nice true color image of Jupiter taken by the Juno probe:]
This summer marks the 40th anniversary of the launches of the two Voyager spacecraft, which are still in contact with earth as they head out into interstellar space:
More about the two deep space explorers:
A longer documentary about the Voyager missions:
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The Cassini-Huygens mission ends on September 15th when the Cassini spacecraft will plunge into Saturn’s atmosphere. Looking back on the 13 years of exploring the Saturn system, the discoveries about Titan, on which the Huygens probe landed, were among the richest of the whole program: Cassini: The Grand Finale: Cassini Prepares to Say Goodbye to a True Titan
Saturn’s giant, hazy moon Titan has been essential to NASA’s Cassini mission during its 13 thrilling years of exploration there. Cassini and the European Huygens probe have revealed a fascinating world of lakes and seas, great swaths of dunes, and a complex atmosphere with weather – with intriguing similarities to Earth. Titan has also been an engine for the mission, providing gravity assists that propelled the spacecraft on its adventures around the ringed planet. For more about the Cassini-Huygens mission, visit https://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov
Over the course of its 13-year mission at Saturn, Cassini has made 127 close flybys of Titan, with many more-distant observations. Cassini also dropped off the European Space Agency’s Huygens probe, which descended through Titan’s atmosphere to land on the surface in January 2005.
Successes for Cassini during its mission include the revelation that, as researchers had theorized, there were indeed bodies of open liquid hydrocarbons on Titan’s surface. Surprisingly, it turned out Titan’s lakes and seas are confined to the poles, with almost all of the liquid being at northern latitudes in the present epoch. Cassini found that most of Titan has no lakes, with vast stretches of linear dunes closer to the equator similar to those in places like Namibia on Earth. The spacecraft observed giant hydrocarbon clouds hovering over Titan’s poles and bright, feathery ones that drifted across the landscape, dropping methane rain that darkened the surface. There were also indications of an ocean of water beneath the moon’s icy surface.
The instruments on Cassini allowed for seeing Titan in different ways: Cassini: The Grand Finale: Two Titans
These views were obtained with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on March 21, 2017. Images taken using red, green and blue spectral filters were combined to create the natural-color view at left. The false-color view at right was made by substituting an infrared image (centered at 938 nanometers) for the red color channel.
More about the final days of Cassini: Cassini: The Grand Finale: Cassini to Begin Final Five Orbits Around Saturn.
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Most everyday there are posts on HiRISE (NASA) (@HiRISE) | Twitter showing images (some in 3D) and videos made with the HiRISE (High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment) camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.
For example, check out these marvelous landscapes:
Flow in the Hellas Montes Region from UAHiRISE on Vimeo.
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NASA JPL highlights the five year anniversary of the Curiosity Rover‘s arrival on Mars with a set of videos about the mission so far:
Five Years Ago and 154 Million Miles Away: Touchdown!
NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover, which landed near Mount Sharp five years ago this week, is examining clues on that mountain about long-ago lakes on Mars.
On Aug. 5, 2012, the mission team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, exalted at radio confirmation and first images from Curiosity after the rover’s touchdown using a new “sky crane” landing method. Transmissions at the speed of light took nearly 14 minutes to travel from Mars to Earth, which that day were about 154 million miles (248 million kilometers) apart.
Those first images included a view of Mount Sharp. The mission accomplished its main goal in less than a year, before reaching the mountain. It determined that an ancient lake environment on this part of Mars offered the conditions needed for life — fresh water, other key chemical ingredients and an energy source.
On Mount Sharp since 2014, Curiosity has examined environments where both water and wind have left their marks. Having studied more than 600 vertical feet of rock with signs of lakes and later groundwater, Curiosity’s international science team concluded that habitable conditions lasted for at least millions of years. With higher destinations ahead, Curiosity will continue exploring how this habitable world changed through time.
For more about the mission, visit: https://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl
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