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Flaring Red Dwarf Star (Illustration)
This illustration shows a red dwarf star orbited by a hypothetical exoplanet.
Red dwarfs tend to be magnetically active, displaying gigantic arcing prominences and a wealth of dark sunspots. Red dwarfs also erupt with intense flares that could strip a nearby planet's atmosphere over time, or make the surface inhospitable to life as we know it.
By mining data from the Galaxy Evolution Explorer (GALEX) spacecraft, a team of astronomers identified dozens of flares at a range of durations and strengths. The team measured events with less total energy than many previously detected flares from red dwarfs.
This is important because, although individually less energetic and therefore less hostile to life, smaller flares might be much more frequent and add up over time to produce a cumulative effect on an orbiting planet.1 -
A delicate ribbon of gas floats eerily in our galaxy. This image, taken by NASA Hubble Space Telescope, is a very thin section of a supernova remnant caused by a stellar explosion that occurred more than 1,000 years ago.
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This photograph is a Hubble Space Telescope (HST) image of a sky full of glittering jewels. The HST peered into the Sagittarius star cloud, a narrow dust free region, providing this spectacular glimpse of a treasure chest full of stars.
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Hubble Views Ancient Storm in the Atmosphere of Jupiter - Montage
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Hubble Finds Many Bright Clouds on Uranus
A recent NASA Hubble Space Telescope view reveals Uranus surrounded by its four major rings and by 10 of its 17 known satellites.1 -
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Key Locations Studied at 'Pahrump Hills' on Mars
NASA's Curiosity Mars rover examined a mudstone outcrop area called "Pahrump Hills" on lower Mount Sharp, in 2014 and 2015.
This view shows locations of some targets the rover studied there.
The blue dots indicate where drilled samples of powdered rock were collected for analysis. The rover drilled a sample of rock powder at "Confidence Hills" in September 2014 and analyzed it with internal laboratory instruments.
Then the mission conducted a walkabout survey up the slope, along the route indicated in yellow, stopping for close inspection at the red-dot locations.
Observations from the walkabout were used to choose where to take additional drilled samples for analysis during a second pass up the slope.
The "Mojave 2" sample was collected in January 2015 and the "Telegraph Peak" one in February 2015.
This view of the outcrop and other portions of Mount Sharp beyond is a mosaic of images taken by the rover's Mast Camera (Mastcam) in September 2014.1 -
Curiosity Rock or Soil Sampling Sites on Mars, Through November 2016
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This graphic maps locations of the sites where NASA's Curiosity Mars rover collected its first 19 rock or soil samples for analysis by laboratory instruments inside the vehicle. It also presents images of the drilled holes where 15 rock-powder samples were acquired. Curiosity scooped two soil samples at each of the other two sites: Rocknest and Gobabeb. The diameter of each drill hole is about 0.6 inch (1.6 centimeters), slightly smaller than a U.S. dime.
The images used here are raw color, as recorded by the rover's Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI) camera. Notice the differences in color of the material at different drilling sites. For the map, north is toward the upper left corner. The scale bar represents 2 kilometers (1.2 miles). The base map is from the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. The latest sample site included is "Sebina,"where Curiosity drilled into bedrock of the Murray formation on Oct. 20, 2016, during the 1,495th Martian day, or sol, of the mission.
Curiosity landed in August 2012 on the plain (named Aeolis Palus) near Mount Sharp (or Aeolis Mons). The drilling dates for the first 13 rock samples collected are, by location: "John Klein" on Feb. 8, 2013 (Sol 182); "Cumberland" on May 19, 2013 (Sol 279); "Windjana" on May 5, 2014 (Sol 621); "Confidence Hills" on Sept. 24, 2014 (Sol 759); "Mojave" on Jan. 29, 2015 (Sol 882); "Telegraph Peak" on Feb. 24, 2015 (Sol 908); "Buckskin" on July 30, 2015 (Sol 1060); "Big Sky" on Sept. 29, 2015 (Sol 1119); "Greenhorn" on Oct. 18, 2015 (Sol 1137); "Lubango" on April 23, 2016 (Sol 1320); "Okoruso" on May 5, 2016 (Sol 1332); "Oudam" on June 4, 2016 (Sol 1361); "Quela" on Sept. 18, 2016 (Sol 1464).2 -
Site of Curiosity Second Bite of Mount Sharp
Gray cuttings from Curiosity drilling into a target called Mojave 2 are visible surrounding the sample-collection hole in this image from NASA Curiosity rover.1 -
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Ariadnes Colles
Iapetus, or occasionally Japetus, is the third-largest natural satellite of Saturn, eleventh-largest in the Solar System, and the largest body in the Solar System known not to be in hydrostatic equilibrium.
Iapetus is a world of contrast, with light and dark regions fitting together like cosmic puzzle pieces.
Cassini Regio on Iapetus (914 miles or 1,471 kilometers across) is covered in a layer of dark, dusty material creating a stark contrast to the much brighter region that surrounds it. This leads to the moon's distinctive, two-toned appearance.
This view looks toward Saturn-facing hemisphere of Iapetus. North on Iapetus is up and rotated 20 degrees to the right.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on March 11, 2017.
The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 1.6 million miles (2.6 million kilometers) from Iapetus.
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Turquoise Swirls in the Black Sea
Most summers, jewel-toned hues appear in the Black Sea. The turquoise swirls are not the brushstrokes of a painting; they indicate the presence of phytoplankton, which trace the flow of water currents and eddies.
On May 29, 2017, the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite captured the data for this image of an ongoing phytoplankton bloom in the Black Sea. The image is a mosaic, composed from multiple satellite passes over the region.
Phytoplankton are floating, microscopic organisms that make their own food from sunlight and dissolved nutrients. Here, ample water flow from rivers like the Danube and Dnieper carries nutrients to the Black Sea. In general, phytoplankton support fish, shellfish, and other marine organisms. But large, frequent blooms can lead to eutrophication—the loss of oxygen from the water—and end up suffocating marine life.
One type of phytoplankton commonly found in the Black Sea are coccolithophores—microscopic plankton that are plated with white calcium carbonate. When aggregated in large numbers, these reflective plates are easily visible from space as bright, milky water.
“The May ramp-up in reflectivity in the Black Sea, with peak brightness in June, seems consistent with results from other years,” said Norman Kuring, an ocean scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. Although Kuring does not study this region, the bloom this year is one of the brightest to catch his eye since 2012.
Other types of phytoplankton can look much different in satellite imagery. “It’s important to remember that not all phytoplankton blooms make the water brighter,” Kuring said. “Diatoms, which also bloom in the Black Sea, tend to darken water more than they brighten it.”1 -
Mimas Global Map - June 2017
This global map of Saturn's moon Mimas was created using images taken during Cassini spacecraft flybys. The moon's large, distinguishing crater, Herschel, is seen on the map at left.
The map is an equidistant (simple cylindrical) projection and has a scale of 710 feet (216 meters) per pixel at the equator. The mean radius of Mimas used for projection of this map is 123.2 miles (198.2 kilometers).
The resolution of the map is 16 pixels per degree.
The update includes new images for almost half of the moon's surface, with new images from two close flybys, in Nov. 2016 and Feb. 2017. The moon's western hemisphere, south pole and parts of the eastern hemisphere received updates in this version.1 -
Moon - North Pole
This view of the north polar region of the Moon was obtained by NASA's Galileo camera during the spacecraft flyby of the Earth-Moon system on December 7 and 8, 1992.1 -
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Northern Summer on Titan
NASA's Cassini spacecraft sees bright methane clouds drifting in the summer skies of Saturn's moon Titan, along with dark hydrocarbon lakes and seas clustered around the north pole.
Compared to earlier in Cassini's mission, most of the surface in the moon's northern high latitudes is now illuminated by the sun.
The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on June 9, 2017, using a spectral filter that preferentially admits wavelengths of near-infrared light centered at 938 nanometers.
Cassini obtained the view at a distance of about 315,000 miles (507,000 kilometers) from Titan.
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Titan Halo
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Titan Pebbles
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