The best Shuttle launch photo ever taken.

Recent Hubble images of Pluto are showing us a world that may be unexpectedly active on the surface. Such a small object so far away that takes so very long to revolve around the sun should not have very many ways to exercise such rapid changes upon its surface. Scientists studying Pluto say that the color shape shifting seen in just two years is shockingly dramatic and they know these changes are not some image artifact as  Charon (Pluto’s dwarf planet partner) remains unchanged during the same period. Plainly, there is something happening on Pluto that is not taking place on another nearby body.

I expected the arrival of New Horizons at Pluto in 2015 to reveal to us another grey frozen cratered world, but instead… the encounter looks like it might be quite a bit more exciting than expected. I cannot wait to see this black, orange and active world up-close and hopefully New Horizons will also reveal to us what processes could possibly be causing such changes to take place. See Centauri Dreams for more.

Don’t usually post images of an eclipse as there are billions and they happen all the time, but this one seems especially nice. Taken from Northern India.

What NASA thinks we might be looking at here is an asteroid that was recently shattered by another asteroid, giving it a comet-like appearance. It stays within the asteroid belt, so it cannot be a comet as those objects are known to be dusty ice-balls that stay in highly elliptical orbits around the Sun.

See the Hubble site for more.

I had really always thought it would be so cool to do a poster set with great design for each of the planets. I actually started a design for the Cassini at Saturn mission, but have yet to complete it. Sure enough someone comes along and knocks the whole system out in one fantastic series. Beat me to it!

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Admit it, deep down inside we (or at least I) all secretly want to explore the heavens untethered from the Earth and unlock all the mysteries of the universe. Perhaps that is why the beautiful info-graphic art of Michael Paukner is so appealing. His work focuses on many scientific themes such as space exploration, as seen in this poster of the Solar System as it is known today (above), to more conspiratorial “junk science” theories like numerology, the Doomsday Planet (follows the link) and that crazy Aztec calendar that ends in 2012.

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It seems pretty unlikely to happen, but starting on January 18 the Mars Odyssey Orbiter will begin listening for signals from the Phoenix. The mission ended last November as the Sun became too dim to continue to provide the solar cells enough energy to keep Phoenix warm and operable. The lander was never intended to survive a Martian winter and has most likely been devastated by the extremes and unlike the rovers, Phoenix is in a polar region which makes those extremities of a Martian winter even greater. Now with the end of Martian winter comes the addition of more sunlight, comparable warmth and therefore a reason to think maybe we can grab enough power to wake up and resume operations. So nobody really expects a technical miracle to take place this week, but in the unlikely event that the lander has survived… the science teams already have a plan in place to take that advantage.

Above is an impressive mosaic image of the frozen water that was found beneath the lander later in the mission. It is thought that the thrusters (which enable a soft surface landing) kicked away the top soil on the way down, revealing a sheet of frozen ice water right underneath the lander’s feet.

Prometheus is the small moon that shepherds Saturn’s outer “F” ring and causes those crazy waves in the particles that make up the ring itself. The phenomenon has been the theme of at least 3 different animations here on wanderingspace.net. The image above is what that small moon in those animations looks like from 60,000 km taken by Cassini on Dec 26, 2009.

Haven’t come across too much lately. When that happens, I like to post these images that have been sitting around collecting virtual dust. Cloud top formations on Saturn taken by Cassini in 2009.

Beautiful set of posters by Simon Page. There are 10 total. See them all here.

The site good.is has this great section called “Transparency” where they illustrate complex and hard to understand topics. Check out this magnificent chart of all the probes that NASA has sent past Earth orbit.

Gordan of course.

This has to be one of the greatest, most alien images ever taken from robotic spacecraft. It approaches how I might expect Enceladus to be depicted if it were in a Star Trek movie. As if the plumes at the edge of the disk back-lit by the Sun were not enough… the trail of smaller plumes breaking through the darkness is absolutely fantastic. The above is a real image but the color is an artistic interpretation by someone would know. Considering how little color is usually found at Enceladus, we can image this is really as good as if it were compiled from a full RGB set of filters. A larger monotone of the same image here.

This image was compiled by Astro0 on unmannedspaceflight.com. Also one of the best views staring down the length of one of Enceladus’ “tiger stripes”.

Ever so sharp look straight down on the South Pole of Enceladus from 1,855 km.

On its way to a 2014 rendezvous with comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, the European Space Agency’s Rosetta spacecraft, with JPL instruments on board, flew past Earth today to pick up energy.

Like the Saturnshine image posted earlier, this is only an estimation of a true color image. Five sources were used to compile this image; clear 1, clear 2, red, blue and another clear filtered image was used to replace the missing green to round it out (this work by S_Walker from unmannedspaceflight.com). We then additionally cleaned out artifacts from the original images and blurred the surrounding geyser haze largely to eliminate posterization noise.

This is the first time anyone has been able to attempt a true color view of the geysers with the availability of the red and blue images. Also a bonus is the considerable amount of Saturnshine seen on the dark side of the moon.