satellite & space

Photos

follow this blog

268 followers

2663 daily readers

rank of 964

Over 30,000 readers every month

Get paid to write for Photos.org.au

Submit a Post
Click Here

[Posting Guidelines]

E-mail Subscription

Receive an e-mail notification of new posts on this site:

Saturn is the sixth planet from the Sun and the second largest planet in the Solar System, after Jupiter.

Saturn is well known for its prominent system of rings, consisting mostly of ice particles with a smaller amount of rocky debris and dust. Sixty-one known moons also orbit the planet

Cassini–Huygens and its obiter are NASA robotic spacecraft currently on a mission studying the planet Saturn and its many moons.
Collected here are a handful of recent images from the Saturnian system, sourced from the Big Picture at Boston.com here.

The Cassini spacecraft captured this natural color view of Saturn almost a month after the planet's August 2009 equinox. The shadow cast on the planet by the rings remains narrow. Mimas can be seen as a speck at lower left. Image obtained with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on September 4th, 2009 from approximately 2.7 million km (1.7 million mi) away from Saturn.

On December 25, 2009, Cassini was on the dark side of Saturn and took this image looking toward the moon Enceladus, seen at top, beyond the planet and its rings. Light passing through Saturn's atmosphere creates the bright arc seen from the top to the bottom of the image. At bottom center, the light passing through is blocked by shadows from the rings.

The moon Prometheus creates an intricate pattern of perturbation in Saturn's F ring while the moon Daphnis disturbs the A ring in this image taken after the planet's August 2009 equinox. Prometheus (86 km, or 53 mi across) can be seen between the thin F ring and the A ring in the middle left of the image. The gravity of potato-shaped Prometheus periodically creates streamer-channels in the F ring. Near the bottom of the image, Daphnis (8 km, or 5 mi across) can be seen creating edge waves in the Keeler Gap of the A ring. The moon has an inclined orbit and its gravitational pull perturbs the orbits of the particles of the A ring, forming the Keeler Gap's edge, and sculpts the edge into waves having both horizontal (radial) and out-of-plane components. Image acquired on Aug. 22, 2009 with a scale of 12 km (7 mi) per pixel.

Cassini approaches close to the moon Enceladus on November 21, 2009, approximately 2,028 km away, showing fissures and ridges in the icy surface.

The shadow of Saturn's largest moon darkens a huge portion of the gas giant planet. Titan (5,150 km, or 3,200 mi across) is not pictured here, but its shadow is elongated across Saturn's upper atmosphere. The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on November 7th, 2009 using a spectral filter sensitive to wavelengths of near-infrared light centered at 752 nanometers. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 2.1 million km (1.3 million mi) from Saturn.

Vote

Add Comments

[ Link ]

Posted By: Ian - Category: satellite & space

Email this Post to a Friend

Upcoming NASA Missions

May 7th 2010 02:50

As reported on Network World, in NASA's recent budget they announced funding for many critical satellite and robotic missions. These missions include a huge planned mission to Mars as well as other operations that will send spacecraft to Pluto, Jupiter, Mercury, Pluto and the Sun. New climate change research and observation satellites are also heavily funded. See a sample below or read the full article here.

Sun spotter

NASA's 6,800 pound Solar Dynamics Observatory will this month hit its orbit around the Sun and start beaming back its first photos. The $808 million spacecraft will eventually send back what NASA called a prodigious rush of pictures about sunspots, solar flares and a variety of other never-before-seen solar events. The idea is to get a better idea of how the Sun works and let scientists better forecast the space weather to offer earlier warnings to protect astronauts and satellites, NASA said.

James Webb Space Telescope (JWST)

NASA says the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) continues to make progress toward a 2014 launch. The Webb telescope will be the most sensitive infrared space telescope ever built. It is designed to see the farthest galaxies in the universe and the light of the first stars; study young planetary systems; and look for conditions suitable for life on planets around other stars. The telescope will feature a large mirror, a little over 21-feet in diameter and a sunshield the size of a tennis court. Key to the James Webb will be its Mid-Infrared Instrument which NASA says will be the most sensitive mid-infrared detector ever flown in space, NASA said.

Climate Change

Also expected to launch this year is the National Polar-Orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System (NPOESS) Preparatory Project. The NPPOESS satellite will collect land, ocean, and atmospheric data to the meteorological and global climate change communities. It will provide atmospheric and sea surface temperatures, humidity sounding, land and ocean biological productivity, and cloud and aerosol properties.

Mars Science Laboratory (MSL)

NASA call this the biggest astrobiology mission to Mars ever. The Mars Science Laboratory should launch before Christmas this year. The Mars Science Laboratory is actually a rover that will drive around the reed planet looking for that elusive data that will tell us whether Mars ever was, or is still is capable of supporting life. The rover will carry the biggest, most advanced suite of instruments for scientific studies ever sent to the Martian surface, NASA said. The rover's onboard laboratory will study rocks, soils, and the local geologic setting in order to detect chemical building blocks of life.

Interior of the Moon

Scheduled for this year, NASA's Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) is expected to determine the structure of the lunar interior, from crust to core and to advance understanding of the thermal evolution of the Moon. GRAIL will actually feature twin spacecraft that will fly in tandem orbits around the moon for several months to measure its gravity field in detail. As a secondary objective, GRAIL will extend knowledge gained from the Moon to the other terrestrial planets, NASA said.

Vote

Add Comments

[ Link ]

Posted By: Ian - Category: satellite & space

Email this Post to a Friend

High Definition Images From Mars

April 28th 2010 02:49

The High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRise) is a camera on board the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. The 65 kg, $40 million (USD) instrument consists of a 0.5 meter reflecting telescope, the largest of any deep space mission, which allows it to take pictures with resolutions up to 0.3 m, resolving objects about a meter across.

NASA recently undertook a program called HiWish which allowed regular citizens to suggest areas on Mars to point the HiRise camera. Some of the first images from the initiative have been released and can be seen below.

Palos Crater

This image shows a portion of the floor in Palos Crater on equatorial Mars. The floor appears bumpy with high-standing layered knobs. Most of the terrain on the floor is weathering into meter-size (yard-size) polygonal blocks. The circular structures in the image, many of which are filled with darker wind-blown material, are eroded impact craters.

Martian North Pole

The Martian north polar layered deposits are an ice sheet much like the Greenland ice sheet on the Earth. Just as with the ice sheet in Greenland this Martian ice sheet contains many layers that record variations in the Martian climate. Sometimes icy layers can be ablated away during warm climates. Later the ice sheet can be buried by new ice layers and grow in size again. It's likely that many of these cycles have occurred over the ice sheet's history.

Side of Olympus Mons

This image covers the northern edge of the largest volcano in the solar system, Olympus Mons on Mars. The margin of Olympus Mons is defined by a massive cliff many kilometers (several miles) tall. At this location, it is nearly 7 kilometers (23,000 feet) tall. The cliff exposes the guts of the volcano, revealing interbedded hard and soft layers. The hard layers are lava and the soft layers may be dust (from large dust storms) or volcanic ash.

Dunes on Floor of Samara Valles

Samara Valles is one of the longest ancient valley systems on Mars. This system traverses more than 1000 kilometers (621 miles) toward the northwest across the heavily cratered southern highlands eroding into the gentle slopes of Terra Meridiani. The valley terminates in the northern lowlands within the Chryse basin where both Viking Lander 1 and Pathfinder are located.

Mesas in Aureum Chaos

Aureum Chaos is a wide region of plateaus, mesas, and knobs. Most of the rocks in this area appear to have formed originally as laterally continuous layers through volcanic or sedimentary processes. Loss of groundwater or ground ice could have then caused the ground to collapse, forming the current surface features of deep valleys and isolated hills with sloped faces. Subtle layering of these rocks can be observed along the slope face seen here, jutting out from under a mantle of surface sediments. Also present along many slopes are dark-toned, discontinuous lineations. These are tracks left behind by boulders that rolled down the slopes.

Vote

Add Comments

[ Link ]

Posted By: Ian - Category: satellite & space

Email this Post to a Friend

Strange Facts About Space

April 5th 2010 01:43

Space is an unusual place to us humans, there the laws of physics no longer seem to apply.
The universe is so huge that it's almost impossible for us to comprehend the sheer enormity of it all.
However, we now believe we have a decent grasp of what goes on in our own solar system. But even in the local neighbourhood things become very strange up there.

As reported on KoldCast.tv, below are some bizarre facts about outer space. Read the full article here.

Tidal effects cause the moon to move about 3.8 cm away from Earth every year. It’s a process called tidal acceleration, the aggregate of competing gravitational forces between a planet and its satellite. As a result, the Earth’s rotation slows down at about .002 seconds a century, and the moon casually inches toward our sister, Venus.

Amazingly, a single day on Venus is longer than its entire year. It takes Venus 243 Earth days to completely rotate on its axis, but just 225 days to orbit the sun. Stranger still, Venus is one of two planets that rotates in reverse, a phenomenon called retrograde motion. Most theories attribute the reverse rotation to an ancient planetary collision. That’s what happens when you make fun of Pluto’s mom.

Here on Earth, liquids tend to flow downward. But in the zero-gravity vacuum of space, any liquid will shape itself into a sphere. It is surface tension, the same phenomenon that causes water to form as a horizontal surface on Earth, that causes liquids to form spheres in space.

All human beings are about two inches taller in space. On Earth, gravity compresses the spine, but in the vacuum of space, the spring-like spine is free to elongate.

Due to the absence of air and wind on the moon, all astronaut footprints last for millions of years, longer than the most permanent structures on Earth. As long as a meteor or any other space particle does not hit the moon, any impressions made into its surface will virtually last forever

Vote

Add Comments

[ Link ]

Posted By: Ian - Category: satellite & space

Email this Post to a Friend

Satellites Orbiting Earth

February 17th 2010 01:47

The first artificial satellite, Sputnik 1, was launched by the Soviet Union in 1957. By 2010 thousands of satellites had been launched into orbit around the Earth. These originate from more than 50 countries and have used the satellite launching capabilities of ten nations. A few hundred satellites are currently operational, whereas thousands of unused satellites and satellite fragments orbit the Earth as space debris.

Satellites are used for a large number of purposes. Common types include military (spy) and civilian Earth observation satellites, communication satellites, navigation satellites, weather satellites, and research satellites. Satellite orbits vary greatly, depending on the purpose of the satellite, and are classified in a number of ways. Well-known (overlapping) classes include low Earth orbit, polar orbit, and geostationary orbit.

The infographic below details the satellites orbiting Earth and their country of origin.

Click to enlarge in a new window

*This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia page for Satellite.

*Image source.

Vote

Add Comments

[ Link ]

Posted By: Ian - Category: satellite & space

Email this Post to a Friend

Could We Live On Mars?

February 8th 2010 01:05

Can Mars Be Terraformed?

[ Click here to read more ]

Vote

Comments (1)

Add Comments

[ Link ]

Posted By: Ian - Category: satellite & space

Email this Post to a Friend

The Speed of Light

January 8th 2010 02:07

The speed of light (usually denoted c) is a physical constant. Its value is exactly 299,792,458 metres per second, often approximated as 300,000 kilometres per second or 186,000 miles per second. It is the speed of electromagnetic radiation (such as radio waves, visible light, or gamma rays) in vacuum, where there are no atoms, molecules or other types of matter that can slow it down

[ Click here to read more ]

Vote

Add Comments

[ Link ]

Posted By: Ian - Category: satellite & space

Email this Post to a Friend

Average Colour of the Universe

January 6th 2010 01:55

What color is the universe? More precisely, if the entire sky were smeared out, what color would the final mix be? This whimsical question came up when trying to determine what stars are commonplace in nearby galaxies. The answer, depicted above, is a conditionally perceived shade of beige. To determine this, astronomers computationally averaged the light emitted by one of the largest sample of galaxies yet analyzed: the 200,000 galaxies of the 2dF survey. The resulting cosmic spectrum has some emission in all parts of the electromagnetic spectrum, but a single perceived composite color. This color has become much less blue over the past 10 billion years, indicating that redder stars are becoming more prevalent. In a contest to better name the color, notable entries included skyvory, univeige, and the winner: cosmic latte

[ Click here to read more ]

Vote

Add Comments

[ Link ]

Posted By: Ian - Category: satellite & space

Email this Post to a Friend

Analemma

December 23rd 2009 02:02

Analemma over the Ukraine

[ Click here to read more ]

Vote

Add Comments

[ Link ]

Posted By: Ian - Category: satellite & space

Email this Post to a Friend

History of Space Missions

November 11th 2009 02:07

In this one image, you can see every single space exploration mission attempted by man. From the 73 missions to the moon to the lone missions exploring Neptune and Uranus and future "New Horizons" mission to Pluto it's all there. It even demonstrates where our oldest spacecraft such as Voyager 1 and Pioneer 10 are up to now.
Click on the image to appreciate all it has to offer.

[ Click here to read more ]

Vote

Add Comments

[ Link ]

Posted By: Ian - Category: satellite & space

Email this Post to a Friend

Space Junk

September 23rd 2009 11:38

Space Junk is the objects in orbit around Earth created by humans, and that no longer serve any useful purpose. They consist of everything from entire spent rocket stages and defunct satellites to explosion fragments, paint flakes, dust, and slag from solid rocket motors, coolant released by RORSAT nuclear powered satellites, deliberate insertion of small needles, and other small particles. Clouds of very small particles may cause erosive damage, like sandblasting. Space "junk" has become a growing concern in recent years, since collisions at orbital velocities can be highly damaging to functional satellites and can also produce even more space debris in the process. This is called the Kessler Syndrome. Some spacecraft, like the International Space Station, are now armoured to mitigate damage from this hazard. Astronauts on space-walks are also vulnerable

There is a surprising amount of Space Junk in orbit, the infographic below sourced from euinfrastructure.com gives a good overview of the what, where and how of space junk

[ Click here to read more ]

Vote

Comments (1)

Add Comments

[ Link ]

Posted By: Ian - Category: satellite & space

Email this Post to a Friend

Magnetic Storms

September 18th 2009 13:53

Associated with solar flares, a geomagnetic storm is caused by a solar wind shock wave which typically strikes the Earth's magnetic field. The solar wind pressure on the magnetosphere will increase or decrease depending on the Sun's activity. These solar wind pressure changes modify the electric currents in the ionosphere. Magnetic storms usually last 24 to 48 hours, but some may last for many days. In 1989, an electromagnetic storm disrupted power throughout most of Quebec—it caused auroras as far south as Texas.

Magnetic storm over Lake LaBerge in Yukon Territory on Feb. 28, 2007

[ Click here to read more ]

Vote

Comments (1)

Add Comments

[ Link ]

Posted By: Ian - Category: satellite & space

Email this Post to a Friend

Perihelion and Aphelion

July 24th 2009 11:54

This year Aphelion, the point in Earth's elliptical orbit when it is farthest from the Sun, occurs tomorrow, July 4th. Of course, that doesn't affect the seasons on our fair planet. Those are determined by the tilt of Earth's axis of rotation and not Earth's distance from the Sun, so July is still winter in the south and summer in northern hemisphere. But it does mean that on July 4th the Sun will be at its smallest apparent size. This composite neatly compares two pictures of the Sun taken with the same telescope and camera on the dates of Perihelion (closest approach) and Aphelion in 2008. The image labels include Earth's distance in kilometers from the Sun on the two dates. Otherwise difficult to notice, the change in the Sun's apparent diameter between Perihelion and Aphelion is clear. The difference amounts to a little over 3 percent.