Tag archives for moons
Help Astronomers Name Pluto’s Moons
Posted by Suzan Eaton on February 12, 2013 
P4 and P5? Surely you can come up with better names for Pluto’s newly-discovered moons. Astronomers at the SETI Institute are asking for your help.
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Armchair astronomers take note: This space atlas is for you. Yes, that kind of atlas—a series of maps and charts that evokes the ability to navigate a place, usually by ship or some sort of vehicle. The maps are remarkably detailed—Mercury’s surface incorporates the latest data from the orbiting Messenger spacecraft and the crater names might surprise you (Mark Twain, Botticelli, Dali, Shakespeare). On Venus nearly every feature is named after goddesses or famous women.
Pluto: a Dwarf Planet With Rings?
Posted by Jason Major on January 26, 2012 
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…
Posted by Before succumbing to her legendary death-by-snake in 30 B.C., Cleopatra VII, last queen of Egypt, gave birth to twins. Alexander Helios and Cleopatra Selene II were born in 40 B.C., two of the eight children sired by Roman general Mark Antony during his lifetime. As it happens, the asteroid 216 Kleopatra also had twins: Two…
This past September the giant planet Jupiter made its closest approach to Earth since 1951, briefly becoming the brightest object in the night sky, aside from the moon. And not too far from that brilliant dot, sky-watchers with even modest binoculars could easily spot one of Jupiter’s distant relatives: the icy gas planet Uranus. Uranus’…
When you’re talking about a gas giant planet with rings, it’s often Saturn in the limelight. After all, you can see that planet’s bright disk of icy particles from Earth with just a modest telescope. But in 1979 the Voyager 1 spacecraft saw that Jupiter has rings too, albeit a much fainter system primarily made…
As if having the most impressive rings in the solar system isn’t enough, Saturn also boasts some of the shiniest “footwear”—just check out new shots of the planet’s southern auroras: —Image courtesy NASA/JPL/University of Arizona/University of Leicester This quartet of candy-colored pictures comes from NASA’s Cassini orbiter, which carries a nifty tool that can collect…
Today scientists with the Cassini mission to Saturn released yet another glorious picture of the gassy planet’s icy rings—in this case, a shot of the shepherd moon Prometheus carving arcs in the thin, outer F ring. —Image courtesy NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute Cassini has been in orbit around Saturn since June 2004, and it’s sent back…
Late last week scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena announced the discovery of a new class of moons orbiting Saturn: the giant propeller moons. Tracked over a four-year period by the Saturn-orbiting Cassini spacecraft, the moons create distinctive propeller shapes as they travel through the planet’s A ring, the outermost of the large,…
In 2 days, 23 hours, and 33 minutes [5:12] hundreds of cities around the world will switch off the lights at precisely 8:30 p.m. local time in honor of Earth Hour. This WWF campaign started in 2007 in Sydney as a kind of public statement on climate change: “By voting with their light switches, Earth…
Today on Earth, people across the globe will be reflecting on water for World Water Day. —NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Image by Reto Stöckli We are a water world—just about any gradeschooler can tell you that water covers roughly 70 percent of Earth’s surface. The trick is that just 2.5 percent of that water…
If Earth’s moon is made of green cheese, Jupiter‘s biggest moon is made of refrozen ice cream. False-color view of Ganymede — mmmmm, planetary Drumstick! —Image courtesy NASA/JPL/DLR According to a new study in Nature Geoscience, the Jovian moon Ganymede used to be similar in structure to its neighbor Callisto. But then, about 3.8 billion…
After a successful four-year mission studying the ringed planet, the Cassini probe was still orbiting Saturn in near perfect health in June 2008. So NASA dug deep and found the funding to keep Cassini gainfully employed. The extension, dubbed the Equinox Mission, is primarily focused on changes wrought on Saturn by the onset of equinox,…
All eyes swiveled toward me when the tie-breaker question was asked at last week’s pub quiz: How many times Earth’s mass is that of Uranus? [insert suppressed giggle here] Think you know? Think carefully. This is pub quiz after all, not Jeopardy—who’s to say the question writers knew the difference between size and mass? On…
It seems fitting that in a year being celebrated worldwide as the 400th anniversary of telescopic astronomy, NASA and ESA have chosen one of Galileo’s first loves, Jupiter, as their next top planet. Cut-away images show the insides of Io, Ganymede, … In January of 1610 the famed Italian Galileo Galilei pointed a homemade ‘scope…
Is it just me, or has it been a slow week so far for space news post-AAS? Admittedly, on the last night of the conference astronomers party like they mean it, as I discovered last year during the winter Austin meeting and had confirmed for me this year in Long Beach. [But that’s just a…
Whew! Egypt = amazing. I can’t even begin to describe the wonder and awe of standing inside a pyramid or walking the Avenue of the Sphinxes or sailing in a felucca on the Nile. It really is something everyone should do at some point in their lives. The best part is that it seems I…
The Cassini spacecraft will be trick-or-treating at Saturn‘s moon Enceladus this Friday, swooping in to snap as many images as possible of the unusual features known as tiger stripes that slash across the moon’s south pole. The maneuver builds on a very close flyby Cassini did earlier this month, which sent it deep into the…
It’s time for a luau! On Wednesday the IAU finally approved a name for our solar system’s fifth dwarf planet: Haumea, after a Hawaiian fertility goddess. Mike Brown of the California Institute of Technology, whose team found the object in 2004, definitely seems to be on a roll filling the sky with non-Greek or Roman…
