Facts Galaxy

2021-07-26 06:06:27 Open / Comment

2021-07-26 06:05:42 Open / Comment

2021-07-26 06:05:36 Open / Comment

2021-07-14 10:57:49 Open / Comment

2021-07-14 10:57:49 Open / Comment

2021-07-14 10:57:46 This is the highest-resolution color departure shot of Pluto's receding crescent from NASA's New Horizons spacecraft, taken when the spacecraft was 120,000 miles (200,000 kilometers) away from Pluto.

Image credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute Open / Comment

2021-07-13 20:45:08 Seeing Titan with Infrared Eyes

These six infrared images of Saturn's moon Titan represent some of the clearest, most seamless-looking global views of the icy moon's surface produced so far. The views were created using 13 years of data acquired by the Visual and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer (VIMS) instrument on board NASA's Cassini spacecraft. The images are the result of a focused effort to smoothly combine data from the multitude of different observations VIMS made under a wide variety of lighting and viewing conditions over the course of Cassini's mission. Open / Comment

2021-07-12 08:48:20 One of the first images of Ganymede taken by NASA's Juno spacecraft during a June 7, 2021, flyby of Jupiter’s giant moon.  Open / Comment

2021-07-07 12:39:46 Methane Detected on Enceladus Could Actually Be a Sign of Life, Study Shows

When the Cassini-Huygens probe dove through the salty plumes belching from the interior of Saturn's moon Enceladus, it made an unexpected detection: a collection of compounds that are also associated with hydrothermal vents on Earth's ocean floor.
In particular, the amount of methane in the plumes caught astrobiologists' attention - it seemed peculiarly high. Even so, it remained possible that known geochemical (that is, non-biological) processes could be responsible for the abundance.
That's no longer the case. Scientists have determined that no known process can be pumping out the amount of methane observed spewing from Enceladus. That means it could be an unknown process - or it could be biological in origin. Open / Comment

2021-07-06 20:58:11 A composite false-color image of the Andromeda galaxy was created by stacking five wide-field-of- view channel images for an exposure of eight seconds. This image demonstrates the exceptional stability obtained by the Tyvak-0130 bus for a nanosatellite-class vehicle. During this series of exposures, two satellites moved through the field of view. Both are represented as two aligned streaks, with the bright set near the middle and the fainter and shorter streaks near the lower left. Credit: LLNL Open / Comment