It might not look as spectacular as an F18/A Hornet on a 60 ft. Mach One highspeed bypass at the Mythbusters show, but it’s faster than you think, even in timelapse.
Category Archives: solar system
Music on a heavenly sphere
Want to hear music on Titan? It’s possible, but travel costs are not covered.
Travel to Saturn’s frozen moon of Titan and you’ll discover lakes of liquid methane, thick smog clouds and exactly 13 minutes and 46 seconds worth of Earth music. Back in 1997, French musicians Julien Civange and Louis Haeri composed four tracks to place aboard ESA’s Titan-bound Huygens probe, which would in turn make the seven-year journey board NASA’s Cassini spacecraft … (Discovery)
Rolling again
It looks like one of those WWII trucks you see on parade once every year. Rolling again, Opportunity – eight years in a row.
With its daily supply of solar energy increasing, NASA’s durable Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity has driven off the sunward-tilted outcrop, called Greeley Haven, where it worked during its fifth Martian winter.
Opportunity’s first drive since Dec. 26, 2011, took the rover about 12 feet (3.67 meters) northwest and downhill on Tuesday, May 8. The rover operations team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., received confirmation of the completed drive late Tuesday, relayed from NASA’s Mars Odyssey orbiter.
“We’re off the Greeley Haven outcrop onto the sand just below it,” said rover driver Ashley Stroupe of JPL. “It feels good to be on the move again.”
While at Greeley Haven for the past 19 weeks, Opportunity used the spectrometers and microscopic imager on its robotic arm to inspect more than a dozen targets within reach on the outcrop. Radio Doppler signals from the stationary rover during the winter months served an investigation of the interior of Mars by providing precise information about the planet’s rotation.
Opportunity will look back with its panoramic camera to acquire multi-filter imaging of the surface targets it studied on Greeley Haven. … (JPL)
A bright sun over Buffalo
And so Alan Friedman was able to make another beautiful picture, again posted on that wonderful website of his, Averted Imagination. This one is from yesterday, and shows us the Sun in Buffalo on May the 5th. The image is taken with a H-alpha filter.
Click on the picture for the full resolution on his own site. He also has a tumblr page, you can find it here.
Get your 3D glasses out for an amazing view
If you happen to have 3D glasses, download this picture, look at it in full rez and be awed and amazed. Here’s the story behind the picture, or better pictures, taken by LROC.
Try pointing your finger to the rim. If you think you’re there, closest to the screen, move your finger forward and see how you are deceived. Then try it with the the bottom of the crater.
Amazing, 1.7MB download of an unnamed Moon crater…
Mirror, mirror in the sky….
Bad stepmom would have loved it. The Moon as a mirror.
Scientists are planning to use NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope to observe next month’s historic transit of Venus across the sun’s face.
But there’s a twist. Researchers can’t point Hubble anywhere near the sun, because our star’s bright light could damage the telescope’s super-sensitive instruments. So Hubble will watch the June 5-6 Venus transit by using the moon as a mirror.
The goal is to see if Hubble can determine the makeup of Venus’ atmosphere by studying sunlight that has poured through it. Astronomers already know a great deal about Venus’ air, so next month’s observations are a test run to see if the technique could be used to determine the atmospheric composition of faraway alien planets, researchers said… (SPACE.com)
Desert beauty
It’s a national holiday here in the Netherlands, so it’s a short blog post today. Just a nice and eerily beautiful scene from Mars, made by Mars Rover Opportunity, taken January 24. What you see is named “Greeley Haven”. (JPL)
