Set to HD, full screen.
This picture by the Galileo spacecraft shows just how cloudy Venus is. Venus is very similar to Earth in size and mass - and so is sometimes referred to as Earth’s sister planet - but Venus has a quite different climate. Venus’ thick clouds and closeness to the make it the hottest planet - much hotter than Earth. When Venus is visible it is usually the brightest object in the sky after the Sun and the Moon. More than 20 spacecraft have visited Venus including Venera 9, which landed on the surface, and Magellan, which used radar to peer through the clouds and make a map of the surface. This visible light picture of Venus was taken by the Galileo spacecraft that orbited Jupiter from 1995 to 2003. Many things about Venus remain unknown, including the cause of mysterious bursts of radio waves!
I just can’t get enough of the Mars Curiosity.
In the words of Phil Plait, “Holy. Haleakala. The simple and sheer amazingness of this picture cannot be overstated. Here we have a picture taken by a camera on board a space probe that’s been orbiting Mars for six years, reset and re-aimed by programmers hundreds of millions of kilometers away using math and science pioneered centuries ago, so that it could catch the fleeting view of another machine we humans flung across space, traveling hundreds of million of kilometers to another world at mind-bending speeds, only to gently – and perfectly – touch down on the surface mere minutes later.
The news these days is filled with polarization, with hate, with fear, with ignorance. But while these feelings are a part of us, and always will be, they neither dominate nor define us. Not if we don’t let them. When we reach, when we explore, when we’re curious – that’s when we’re at our best. We can learn about the world around us, the Universe around us. It doesn’t divide us, or separate us, or create artificial and wholly made-up barriers between us. As we saw on Twitter, at New York Times Square where hundreds of people watched the landing live, and all over the world: science and exploration bind us together. Science makes the world a better place, and it makes us better people.”
Truth.
Mars Curiosity lander will break into the Martian atmosphere with a scheduled decent August 6th. NASA is using a parachute and then a crazy risky rocket propelled crane to lower the lander onto the surface. Stay tuned! It will be exciting.
The Solar Dynamics Observatory, or SDO, is the most advanced spacecraft ever designed to study the sun. It provides images with resolution 8 times better than high-definition television. On June 5 2012, SDO collected images of the rarest predictable solar event, the transit of Venus across the face of the sun, in order to produce this stunning video in ultraviolet and visible light.
Nasa announces plans to put man on bus to Cleveland.
More here: http://www.theonion.com/articles/nasa-announces-plans-to-put-man-on-bus-to-clevelan,28024/
I was stunned to find out that most/many people are unaware that Mars has polar ice caps. Here are three images; the first is the northern cap, Planum Boreum, from the Viking-1 mission, the second is Planum Boreum from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), and the third is the southern ice cap (Planum Australe, which sublimates each year) taken from Earth through a small 8” telescope.
Keep looking up!
The flight deck of the Endeavor. Yesterday, the shuttle Discovery was attached to a jumbo jet and flown to the Smithsonian in DC. Thousands of people lined the Potomac to see it, talking all proud pig about the United States’ science and technology. Don’t they realize that it is going to a museum and that we have no capabilities for manned space flight anymore? Oh, the irony….
I am embarrassed.
“Science literacy is the capacity to ask intelligent questions about the physical world around you.” -NDT
A dust devil on the Martian surface, taken by the MRO. 30m across and up to 800m high, not so much a dust devil as a massive tornado!
The Milky Way and storms over Africa, from the ISS.
This is Dr. Kathryn Sullivan. She is the first American woman to walk in space, she has served as chief scientist and deputy administrator for the NOAA, and she is rad.
Riding the solid rocket booster to sub space, then back to Earth. So sad that the U.S. no longer has a manned space program.
