Tag archives for solar system
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It’s rare that astronomers declare news with great certainty, so the announcement that water ice was confirmed in Mercury’s poles is an “exclamation point.” The amount of ice is also astounding—100 billion to a trillion metric tons, or something like layering Washington, D.C. with 2 to 2.5 miles of ice.
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.
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Breaking Orbit guest blogger Marc Kaufman describes the joyful atmosphere, relief and pride inside the NASA Jet Propulsion Jet Laboratory a few hours ago, when scientists, engineers and technicians got confirmation from Mars that after years of hard work and a nail-biting descent their roving science laboratory Curiosity had been placed on the Red Planet apparently exactly as planned.
By dropping the one-ton rover Curiosity into a Martian crater (with a three-mile high mountain nearby!), and equipping it to search over two years for the building blocks of possible extraterrestrial life; humans are once again at a great moment of adventure and exploration to savor.
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…
A New Milestone for New Horizons
Posted by Jason Major on December 9, 2011 
Artist’s rendering of New Horizons. Southwest Research Institute (Dan Durda)/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (Ken Moscati) Last Friday, December 2, 2011, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft became the closest spacecraft ever to Pluto, a record previously held by Voyager 1 which came within 983 million miles of Pluto on January 29, 1986. This…
Posted by 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…
As anyone who’s recently cleaned their attic can tell you, unexpectedly finding a large spider sitting in a dark, hidden part of your home can elicit excitement, consternation, and sometimes a family squabble. Apparently it’s no different if you are a planetary scientist, even when the home in question is the solar system and the…
