Newly-discovered frozen peaks on Pluto are taller than Ben Nevis while images of Nix reveal an unusual red spot
The latest pictures to be beamed back from the far reaches of the Solar System show a new mountain range on Pluto and the first close up images of two of the dwarf-planet's smaller moons.
Animated Flyover of Pluto's Icy Mountain
NASA's New Horizons probe has discovered a new, mountain range on bright, heart-shaped region named Tombaugh Region.
These newly-discovered frozen peaks are estimated to be around 5,000ft high – about 600ft taller than Ben Nevis.
The Norgay Mountains discovered by New Horizons on July 15 are much taller, around 11,000ft, roughly the height of The Pyrenees.
The new range is just west of the region within Pluto's heart called Sputnik Plain and some 68 miles northwest of Norgay Mountains..
New Horizons has also picked up the first images large images of two of Pluto's smaller moons.
Nix and Hydra – the second and third moons to be discovered – are approximately the same size, but their similarity ends there.
New Horizons' first colour image of Nix shows a jelly bean shaped satellite which is 26 miles long and 22 miles wide.
Although the overall surface colour of Nix is neutral grey in the image, the newfound region has a distinct red tint. Hints of a bull's-eye pattern lead scientists to speculate that the reddish region is a crater.
Meanwhile, the sharpest image yet received from New Horizons of Pluto's satellite Hydra shows that its irregular shape resembles the state of Michigan.
There appear to be at least two large craters, one of which is mostly in shadow. The upper portion looks darker than the rest of Hydra, suggesting a possible difference in surface composition.
Source: Telegraph
Posted in astronomy, nasa, planet, pluto, SOLAR SYSTEM, space explorationTagged astronomy, charon, crater, darkmatterspace, hydra, image, moon, mountains, nasa, new horizons, nix, photo, photography, planet, pluto, solar system, space exploration, surface, wallpaper5 Comments
Stunning first hi-definition image of Pluto reveals huge mountains
Posted on July 16, 2015 by himanshuchaudhary513
The first ever high-resolution image of Pluto has been beamed back to Earth showing water ice and 11,000ft (3,350 metre) mountains. The mountains likely formed no more than 100 million years ago – mere youngsters relative to the 4.56-billion-year age of the solar system. Nasa says they may still be in the process of building
Like the rest of Pluto, this region would presumably have been pummeled by space debris for billions of years and would have once been heavily cratered – unless recent activity had given the region a facelift, erasing those pockmarks.
'We now have an isolated small planet that is showing activity after 4.5 billion years,' said Alan Stern, New Horizons' principal investigator. 'It's going to send a lot of geophysicists back to the drawing board.'
'This is one of the youngest surfaces we've ever seen in the solar system,' added Jeff Moore of New Horizons' Geology, Geophysics and Imaging Team (GGI).
This is the first time astronomers have seen a world that is mostly composed of ice that is not orbiting a planet.
Unlike the icy moons of giant planets, Pluto cannot be heated by the gravitational pull of a larger planetary body. Nasa says some other process must be generating the mountainous landscape.
'This may cause us to rethink what powers geological activity on many other icy worlds,' says GGI deputy team leader John Spencer of the Southwest Research Institute.
In a Wednesday press conference, scientists also revealed a high-resolution photo of Pluto's moon Charon, which is covered in cliffs and ridges:
They also released the first-ever photo of Pluto's tiny moon Hydra, which appears to be covered in water ice:
A new sneak-peak image of Hydra is the first to reveal its apparent irregular shape and its size, estimated to be about 27 by 20 miles (43 by 33km). The surface shows differences in brightness, which suggests that Hydra's outer layer is composed manly of water ice .
Read more: Daily Mail
Posted in astronomy, comet, nasa, planet, pluto, SOLAR SYSTEM, space explorationTagged amazing, astronomy, charon, close, cosmos, hd, hydra, ice, icy, images, moon, mountains, nasa, new horizons, nix, photo, planet, pluto, solar system, space, space exploration, stunning, universe7 Comments
The New Horizons Pluto mission is a big deal. Here are Some reasons why
SOURCE : vox.com
NASA's New Horizons spacecraft is about to show us an alien world for the first time. At precisely 7:49 am ET on Tuesday, the probe will become the first spacecraft to fly by Pluto.
New Horizons has been en route for nine years, traveling more than 3 billion miles. The flyby will be over in a matter of minutes, as the probe frantically takes hundreds of photos and collects data on Pluto's atmosphere, geology, and moons. All this data will be enormously valuable to scientists as they seek to understand our solar system and how it formed billions of years ago.
More than anything, this mission is about broadening our horizons — taking in just a little bit more of the impossibly vast universe we live in.
1) We've never seen Pluto before
Pluto feels familiar. It's easy to imagine the small, frigid rock, millions of miles from the sun and covered in ice.
But what you're picturing in your head when you think about Pluto is probably an artist's illustration. Until very recently, we didn't even know exactly what color it was — and the best photos we had of Pluto looked like this:
New Horizons is going to change that in a very big way. Already, as it's closed in on Pluto, it's given us way better photos than ever before:
Pluto (right) and its moon Charon, as seen by New Horizons on July 11. (NASA-JHUAPL-SWRI)
The high-resolution photos to come will give us detailed topographical maps, just like those provided by the satellites that orbit Earth. They could reveal mountains, ice caps, volcanoes, or even an ocean of liquid water under the ice. "Who knows what kind of bizarre things we'll find up close?" Stern said.
2) This mission will remind you how vast space really is
Earth, as seen by the Voyager spacecraft, from more than 4 billion miles away.
We spend our entire lives on the surface of Earth — so it's hard to really grasp how far away Pluto truly is from us.
But as an analogy, think of Earth as a basketball. By comparison, Pluto would be a little larger than a golf ball. But if you wanted to keep the scale constant, you'd have to put that golf ball incredibly far away: 50 to 80 miles (depending on its location in orbit). This mission, like many activities in space, is a good reminder of how vast our corner of the universe is — and how absurdly tiny our entire earthly realm of experience is by comparison.
And it's not just the size of space that boggles the mind. It's also the timescale on which everything occurs. Pluto takes 248 Earth years to orbit the sun. To put it another way, the entirety of US history has occurred during a single Plutonian orbit.
3) We won't get many more missions like this for a while
There's a mission to Europa planned, but it won't reach the moon for a decade or more.
The past few decades have been filled with all sorts of fascinating missions to the planets, moons, asteroids, and comets of our solar system — uncrewed probes sent every few years, run by trained scientists, and supported by government funding.
But the sad truth is that this era is largely drawing to a close. As David W. Brown writes in an article on the dark future of American space exploration, "There is nothing budgeted in the pipeline to take its place. Yesterday invested in today. But we are not investing in tomorrow."
This is the result of cutbacks to NASA's planetary exploration budget. The OSIRIS-REx probe will launch next year, to travel to an asteroid and bring back a sample, but it won't return until 2023. Meanwhile, a mission to Jupiter's moon Europa is in the works, but it likely won't be launched until 2025 at the earliest, and wouldn't reach Europa until the 2030s.
In other words: Enjoy this brief flyby. It's going to be a while before any NASA probe visits a new world.
4)This is a staggering technological achievement
t's hard to appreciate just how difficult it is to send a spacecraft to Pluto. But think of it this way: because it's so incredibly far away, it took New Horizons nine years to cover the 3-billion-mile trip there — which means the craft is using decade-old technology, traveling a route that was calculated years ago.
New Horizons' trajectory through the solar system.
Despite this, NASA engineers managed to get the tiny probe — about the size and shape of a grand piano — to an incredibly precise spot in space, using Jupiter's gravity as a slingshot to accelerate it outward and a few thruster burns over the years to keep the probe on track.
Along the way, they had to worry about potentially damaging debris nearby Pluto — as well as a scary software glitch this past weekend, which was, thankfully, resolved. Now New Horizons is going to fly within 7,750 miles of Pluto, coming closer than its moons.
Because New Horizons is traveling at such a high speed (about 31,000 miles per hour) and can't slow down, the flyby will be over in a matter of minutes — fording it to collect all its data in a tiny window of time.
And receiving all that data is another huge challenge. Because New Horizons is so far away, it takes about 4.5 hours for any data it sends back to reach Earth. And the signal is so faint that NASA has to use 200-foot-wide radio dishes (one each in Australia, California, and Spain) to pick it up. This means an extremely low rate of data transmission: about 1 kilobit per second, more than 50 times slower than a 56k modem from the '90s. It takes more than 42 minutes for New Horizons to fully transmit an image that's 1024 pixels wide.
If you haven't been paying attention so far, now's the time to start. This is a really big deal.
Posted in nasa, planet, pluto, SOLAR SYSTEM, space explorationTagged amazing, asteroids, astronomy, ceres, charon, comet, cosmos, darkmatterspace, deep space, dwarf, Earth, kuiper belt, mission, nasa, new horizons, planet, pluto, solar system, space, space exploration, technology, universe7 Comments
Dwarf planet Ceres reveals pyramid-shaped mystery
Posted on June 25, 2015 June 25, 2015 by himanshuchaudhary513
Image of Pyramid taken by NASA's Spacecraft DAWN. Do you think it is just a simple mountain or Something else.
OK, this is just too much.
First, NASA's Dawn probe spotted curiously sparkly bright spots on the surface of Ceres, the dwarf planet that lies in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.
Beats us, the scientists said.
Now, cameras on the tractor-trailer-size spacecraft have captured a baffling structure rising 3 miles above the planet's cratered surface.
Conveniently, the thing looks an awful lot like a pyramid."Intriguing," the NASA scientists said.
Another Image of Ceres showing Strange mysterious lights. Image taken by NASA's DAWN spacecraft.
To be fair, the agency offered no suggestion that the towering structure is an offering to some long-lost space emperor or home to our new alien overlords.
And, to be even more fair, it's probably just a really tall mountain in a solar system filled with wondrous and strange natural phenomena.
But the Dawn mission has done nothing but stoke imaginations since the discovery of mysterious bright spots on the surface of the dwarf planet in February and the beginning of the probe's orbit in March.
Folks have claimed to have spotted giant alien motherships hovering over the planet, bat-winged spaceships parked on its surface and even evidence of alien cities.
But the mystery only deepened with the most recent batch of images showing even more bright spots alongside the largest one, which NASA said looks to stretch some 6 miles.
Many, of course, insist that the spots look for all the world like brightly lit cities twinkling on the shadowed surface of the distant dwarf planet.
I knew it! There's gambling going on on Ceres! #aliens pic.twitter.com/QP6PB6JFho
— Chris Reher (@Chris_Reher) June 13, 2015
Of course, NASA hasn't traveled down that road. Scientists, they say, still don't know what the spots are. Maybe ice. Maybe salt.
"But scientists are considering other options, too," NASA said coyly.
But #itsaliens, right?
Source : FirstPost
NOTE : Now, if you spent more time on Blogger then you can Check out my new BLOGGER Blog.
Posted in asteroid, astronomy, life, nasa, SOLAR SYSTEMTagged alien, ancient aliens, asteroids, astronomy, ceres, dark, darkmatterspace, dawn, dwarf, image, life, lights, matter, mysterious, nasa, nature, photography, planet, pyramids, solar system, spacecraft, strange, travel, ufo3 Comments
New Horizons' Pluto Approach Hyped in Epic Video
Dark Matter Space Blogger
Artistic Depiction of Pluto
The National Space Society put together an incredible video preview of the history-making moment. It has the vibe of a movie trailer, complete with epic narration and stunning visuals, and it perfectly captures why space enthusiasts are so psyched about the New Horizons mission.
The video sweeps you through a timeline of the last half century of space exploration using beautiful images of each planet we've explored, starting with Venus in 1962 and ending with Neptune in 1989.
New Horizons will reach Pluto and its moons on July 14, and they will be "the farthest worlds ever to be explored by humankind," the video says.
So far that the sun appears as a faint dot.
Here is the Video,
Source : businessinsider
Posted in nasa, planet, pluto, SOLAR SYSTEM, space explorationTagged alien, asteroids, astronomy, astrophysicist, charon, dark, darkmatterspace, exoplanet, hd, kuiper belt, matter, nasa, national space society, nature, neptunian, new horizons, photography, physics, planet, pluto, science, space, space exploration, trans, travel, universe, video, wallpaper6 Comments
Mars has Beautiful Auroras Visible with the Naked Eye, NASA Confirms
The stunning light show is similar to the Northern Lights, but a different colour
The Northern Lights are one of Earth's most spectacular phenomena – with eerie green and red streaks colouring the sky.
It turns out that Mars has a similar light show – visible to the naked eye of anyone on the surface of the Red Planet – but it glows a bright blue.
That's according to research by planetary scientist Cyril Simon Wedlund from Aalto University.
He and his team carried out an experiment in the lab to simulate the conditions on Mars.
The Planeterella sphere simulates a magnetized planet with an atmosphere of CO2 and bombarded by the solar wind. Blue aurorae develop according to its magnetic field configuration. (D. Bernard/IPAG — CNRS)
The experiment replicated the Martian atmosphere – made up mostly of carbon dioxide – using a 'Planeterrella', a piece of kit that can recreate aurora in the laboratory.
In the case of the Mars experiment, a blue glow formed around the magnetic structures.
They believe that blue is the most prominent color, though red and green may also make an appearance, and that the lights — like ones on Earth — appear several times in a solar cycle, after intense solar activity.
If an astronaut looked to the southern sky from the surface of Mars during one of these flare-ups, the researchers say, he or she would see a sky glowing with blue. Until then, we'll just have to keep imagining them.
The Auroras are visible in many other planets like Jupiter, Saturn. below are the some photographs of auroras taken by various probes.
Source : Washington post, Mirror
Posted in astronomy, Mars, nasa, planet, SOLAR SYSTEM, space explorationTagged aalto university, astronomy, aurora, blue, cnsa, dark, darkmatterspace, image, isro, jupiter, mars, nasa, northern lights, photo, photography, pic, planet, planeterella, red planet, roscosmos, saturn, solar system, space, universe, wallpaper4 Comments
Pluto's five moons captured on camera for first time EVER
Posted on May 16, 2015 by himanshuchaudhary513
PLUTO'S five moons have been captured on camera for the first time EVER as a NASA probe nears the dwarf planet.
The historic moment was recorded by NASA's New Horizons probe, which is exploring Pluto and beyond.
Previously the probe has only caught footage of Pluto, which was previously downgraded from its status as a full planet, as well as its largest moon Charon and two of its smallest moons – Hydra and Nix.
However, now, Kerberos and Styx, the dwarf planet's smallest and faintest moons, are also visible.
Detecting these tiny moons from a distance of more than 55 million miles is amazing, and a credit to the team that built our LORRI long-range camera and John Spencer's team of moon and ring hunters.
Alan Stern, New Horizons principal investigator
John Spencer, programme scientist of the Southwest Research Institute in Colorado, said: "New Horizons is now on the threshold of discovery. If the spacecraft observes any additional moons as we get closer to Pluto, they will be worlds that no one has seen before."
NASA said initial viewing appeared to show only four moons visible in the footage, but Charon is also in the images – although it blends into the bright centre of imagery.
Pluto's four smaller moons were discovered by scientists using the Hubble Space Telescope.
Nix and Hydra were found in 2005, while Kerberos and Styx were discovered more recently in 2011 and 2012 respectively.
The unmanned New Horizons probe will start looking for any more more moons and rings around Pluto this month.
However, astronomers fear previously unseen objects in the dwarf planet's vicinity may put the spacecraft in jeopardy as it heads toward its closest approach in July – and navigators will be very cautious as it nears.
Alan Stern, New Horizons principal investigator, said: "Detecting these tiny moons from a distance of more than 55 million miles is amazing, and a credit to the team that built our LORRI long-range camera and John Spencer's team of moon and ring hunters."
New Horizons was launched towards Pluto in 2006.
Once the probe flies past Pluto and its moons on July 14, the spacecraft will continue flying farther from Earth, investigating other cold bodies past the dwarf planet.
Source : Express.co.uk
Posted in moon, nasa, planet, pluto, SOLAR SYSTEM, space explorationTagged charon, cnsa, cosmos, darkmatterspace, hubble, hydra, image, isro, kerberos, lorri, moons, nasa, nature, new horizons, nix, photography, pic, planet, pluto, roscosmos, solar system, space, space exploration, styx, travel, universe, wallpaper2 Comments
NASA's Messenger Spacecraft Crashes into Mercury, Captures Stunning Shots Before Demise
Posted on May 3, 2015 May 3, 2015 by himanshuchaudhary513
Artist rendering of Messenger above Mercury.
NASA confirmed Thursday afternoon that its Messenger spacecraft collided into Mercury's surface at more than 8,000 mph, creating a new crater on the planet.
NOTE : MESSENGER (a backronym of MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry, and Ranging) was a robotic NASA spacecraft which orbited the planet Mercury.MESSENGER became the second mission after Mariner 10's 1975 flyby to reach Mercury when it made a flyby in January 2008, followed by a second flyby in October 2008, and a third flyby in September 2009, prior to entering Mercury's orbit in March 2011. It was the first spacecraft to orbit Mercury.
"Going out with a bang as it impacts the surface of Mercury, we are celebrating Messenger as more than a successful mission," John Grunsfeld, associate administrator for NASA's Science Mission Directorate said. "The Messenger mission will continue to provide scientists with a bonanza of new results as we begin the next phase of this mission — analyzing the exciting data already in the archives, and unraveling the mysteries of Mercury."
But before Messenger's years-long mission came an end, NASA released several new photos of Mercury, as taken by the spacecraft. Some of these photos were composite imagery, combining years of data and photos collected by Messenger, according to CNET.
Here's one of the incredible false-color images recently published by NASA. The different colors signify variations in mineral composition, topography and other factors on Mercury's surface.
Here are some images of Mercury,
Click Image to Start Slideshow
The mission ended, according to NASA, because the spacecraft's thrusters have run out of fuel.
Source : Weather.com
Posted in astronomy, mercury, nasa, planet, SOLAR SYSTEM, space explorationTagged astronomy, cnsa, cosmos, crash, darkmatterspace, Earth, ESA, flyby, image, india, isro, mercury, messenger, mission, nasa, nature, pics, planet, roscosmos, russia, science, shots, solar system, space, space exploration, technology, travel, universe, usa, wallpaper5 Comments