04 September 2011
While the surfaces of most of the Solar System’s moons are dominated by impact craters, the surface of Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, features very few craters. Until recently only seven craters had been spotted on Titan (5,150 km across).
31 August 2011
On route to Jupiter, the largest planet, NASA's Juno spacecraft pictured Earth and the Moon. The image was taken by the spacecraft's camera, JunoCam, on 26 August 2011, when the spacecraft was approximately 10 million km from Earth. The image was taken as part of the mission team's examination of the Juno spacecraft. The team is performing its initial detailed tests on the Juno's instruments, following its launch on 5 August 2011.
27 August 2011
Scientists using data from NASA's Wide Field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) spacecraft have discovered the coldest class of star-like objects, brown dwarfs with temperatures as cool as the human body. Brown dwarfs are small faint objects, known as failed stars, since they do not evolve into normal stars. Stars shine by burning hydrogen within their cores, through nuclear fusion reactions, while brown dwarfs have masses that are too low to sustain these reactions.
23 August 2011
The European Southern Observatory (ESO) recently published an amazing image of a gigantic red star, known as Betelgeuse. (The name of this star comes from Arabic.) The image, acquired by a team of astronomers, observing with ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT), shows a previously unseen large glowing nebula around Betelgeuse. This nebula, which resembles flames bursting from Betelgeuse, is formed because its star expels its gaseous material into space.
19 August 2011
NASA's recently published wonderful images of asteroid Vesta, acquired by the Dawn spacecraft, currently in orbit around Vesta, for a year-long study of this small enigmatic world. (The name Vesta comes from Roman mythology.) The images reveal Vesta’s rugged terrain, including numerous impact craters and large grooves. Intriguingly, Vesta is characterized by a huge deep crater (460 km wide), located near its south pole.
15 August 2011
NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity, a robotic six-wheeled rover, studying the Red Planet since 2004, has arrived at a new research area, a crater known as Endeavour crater, to examine interesting rocks, and search for evidence of past presence of water on Mars. The slowly roaming rover, operating as a robot geologist, reached Endeavor crater on 9 August 2011.
11 August 2011
NASA recently published a wonderful image of a distant cosmic cloud, the glowing remains of a dead Sun-like star. The image was acquired by the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), a sophisticated observatory, exploring the cosmos from Earth orbit. The cloud is known as the Necklace Nebula, as it is similar to a necklace in shape. It is technically designated PN G054.2-03.4.
07 August 2011
On 5 August 2011, NASA’s Juno spacecraft launched from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, aboard an Atlas V rocket, beginning a five-year spaceflight to Jupiter, the largest planet. Juno will conduct a detailed study of Jupiter, aiming to yield new insights into Jupiter’s origin and evolution, and a better understanding of our Solar System and planetary systems around other stars. Interestingly, it is named after the mythological Roman goddess Juno, the wife of Jupiter, the king of gods.
04 August 2011
Astronomers studying observations acquired by NASA's WISE spacecraft have discovered the first known object, a tiny asteroid, moving around the Sun along Earth’s orbit. (WISE stands for Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer.) Three other planets, Mars, Jupiter and Neptune, have orbital partners, small asteroids that orbit around particular points, along the planetary orbits.
04 August 2011
On 21 July 2011, NASA’s Space Shuttle Atlantis landed safely, in Kennedy Space Center in Florida. This was the end of the final shuttle mission, concluding the American space shuttle program, an eventful magnificent era in space exploration. NASA recently published an intriguing image, showing Atlantis, while leaving orbit, and diving into Earth’s atmosphere. The image was taken by an astronaut, aboard the International Space Station (ISS), Earth’s largest artificial satellite, orbiting at an altitude of about 350 km.