We're all made of Stardust...

Opportunity’s Selfie

NASA’s Mars Rover Opportunity catches its own late-afternoon shadow in this dramatically lit view eastward across Endeavour Crater on Mars.

The rover used the panoramic camera (Pancam) between about 4:30 and 5:00 p.m. local Mars time to record images taken through different filters and combined into this mosaic view.

Most of the component images were recorded during the 2,888th Martian day, or sol, of Opportunity’s work on Mars (March 9, 2012). At that time, Opportunity was spending low-solar-energy weeks of the Martian winter at the Greeley Haven outcrop on the Cape York segment of Endeavour’s western rim. In order to give the mosaic a rectangular aspect, some small parts of the edges of the mosaic and sky were filled in with parts of an image acquired earlier as part of a 360-degree panorama from the same location.

Opportunity has been studying the western rim of Endeavour Crater since arriving there in August 2011. This crater spans 14 miles (22 kilometers) in diameter, or about the same area as the city of Seattle. This is more than 20 times wider than Victoria Crater, the largest impact crater that Opportunity had previously examined. The interior basin of Endeavour is in the upper half of this view.

The mosaic combines about a dozen images taken through Pancam filters centered on wavelengths of 753 nanometers (near infrared), 535 nanometers (green) and 432 nanometers (violet). The view is presented in false color to make some differences between materials easier to see, such as the dark sandy ripples and dunes on the crater’s distant floor.

Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Cornell/Arizona State Univ.

Took these photos last night using my phone, held up to various telescopes at the YAS observatory. Just goes to show you don’t need to have expensive equipment to take photos of space. :)

Top left: Venus as a pretty little crescent. :)

Top right: Mars, not a brilliant photo but it was the only one I took of it and wanted to post it anyway.

Bottom: Saturn, a lot better than my previous attempts so I’m pretty proud of this one. :D

SciShow - Let’s Go To Mars

If you haven’t encoutered SciShow before, go check out some of their videos here. They’re all very good. :)

Flowing Barchan Sand Dunes on Mars
Image Credit: HiRISE, MRO, LPL (U. Arizona), NASA

Explanation: When does Mars act like a liquid? Although liquids freeze and evaporate quickly into the thin atmosphere of Mars, persistent winds may make large sand dunes appear to flow and even drip like a liquid. Visible on the above image right are two flat top mesas in southern Mars when the season was changing from Spring to Summer. A light dome topped hill is also visible on the far left of the image. As winds blow from right to left, flowing sand on and around the hills leaves picturesque streaks. The dark arc-shaped droplets of fine sand are called barchans, and are the interplanetary cousins of similar Earth-based sand forms. Barchans can move intact a downwind and can even appear to pass through each other. When seasons change, winds on Mars can kick up dust and are monitored to see if they escalate into another of Mars’ famous planet-scale sand storms.

A Dust Devil of Mars
Credit: HiRISE, MRO, LPL (U. Arizona), NASA

Explanation: It was late in the northern martian spring when the HiRISE camera onboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter spied this local denizen. Tracking south and east (down and right) across the flat, dust-covered Amazonis Planitia the core of the whirling dust devil is about 30 meters in diameter. Lofting dust into the thin martian atmosphere, its plume reaches more than 800 meters above the surface. Not following the path of the dust devil, the plume is blown toward the east by a westerly breeze. Common in this region, dust devils occur as the surface is heated by the Sun, generating warm, rising air currents that begin to rotate. Tangential wind speeds of up to 110 kilometers per hour are reported for dust devils in other HiRISE images.

the-star-stuff:

Terrestrial Planets

Also known as rocky planets, these bodies are composed primarily of rock and metal and have very high densities. They also tend to be relatively small in size and have slow periods of rotation. The terrestrial planets in our solar system are Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars. They are the planets closest to the Sun. Terrestrial planets tend to have very few natural satellites, or moons. Of the four terrestrial planets in our solar system, only two have moons. Earth has one moon while Mars has two.

Images Credit: solarsystem.nasa.gov

the-star-stuff:

What is this cloudy spot on Mars?

Mars watchers have a bit of a mystery on their hands. An astronomy buff captured this photo of the red planet, with what looks like a growth emerging from the sphere. So is it a towering cloud? Or just a trick of the light?

Amateur astronomer Wayne Jaeschke has taken many pictures of the night sky, but when he took this photo of Mars, he knew it was something unusual. He posted the photo on the site Cloudy Nights, explaining that sources had suggested it was a high-altitude water-ice cloud over Mars’ Acidalia region

The Mars Space Flight Facility at Arizona State University has also been observing the curious cloudy spot using the Thermal Emission Imaging System on NASA’s Mars Odyssey orbiter. There are still a number of theories as to the origin of the cloud — it could be debris from a meteor impact, a towering weather system, or perhaps just a trick of the light. You can see Jaeschke’s animation of the anomaly to get a better sense of what they’re looking at.

Whatever it is, the anomaly is shrinking. In the meantime, professional and amateur astronomers are working in tandem to figure out just what’s going on out there on Mars.

Mysterious cloud spotted on Mars [Cosmic Log via Metafilter]

Earth and Moon, as seen from Mars.

The image was acquired on October 3, 2007, by the HiRISE camera on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

At the time the image was taken, Earth was 142 million kilometers (88 million miles) from Mars, giving the HiRISE image a scale of 142 kilometers (88 miles) per pixel, an Earth diameter of about 90 pixels and a moon diameter of 24 pixels. The phase angle is 98 degrees, which means that less than half of the disk of the Earth and the disk of the moon have direct illumination. We could image Earth and moon at full disk illumination only when they are on the opposite side of the sun from Mars, but then the range would be much greater and the image would show less detail.

Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona

We live in a beautiful solar system…