Space

Lake Poopo, Bolivia




In the high plains of the Andes in Bolivia, Lake Poopo has virtually vanished, as shown in this image from NASA Terra spacecraft. Once covering over 3,000 square kilometers, the lake essentially dried up in 2015.

What led to Lake Poopo's demise? Water diversions upstream, weather extremes and recurrent droughts are thought to blame.

(July 1997) --- Several islands in the Canary chain and the cloud formations that are generally associated with this chain.

Colorful Equatorial Gullies in Krupac Crater



Although large gullies (ravines) are concentrated at higher latitudes, there are gullies on steep slopes in equatorial regions, as seen in this image captured by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).

The colors of the gully deposits match the colors of the eroded source materials. Krupac is a relatively young impact crater, but exposes ancient bedrock. Krupac Crater also hosts some of the most impressive recurring slope lineae (RSL) on equatorial Mars outside of Valles Marineris.

The first planets beyond our solar system were discovered in 1992, halfway between “Return of the Jedi” and “The Phantom Menace.” Since then, 1284 exoplanets have been added to the list. And if that figure doesn’t wow you, observations by NASA’s Kepler space telescope suggest there are billions of habitable planets in our Milky Way galaxy.

http://www.space.com/32847-nasa-kepler-1284-exoplanets-find-in-pictures.html

Panorama with Active Linear Dune in Gale Crater, Mars




This 360-degree mosaic from the Mast Camera (Mastcam) on NASA's Curiosity Mars rover looks out over a portion of the Bagnold Dunes, which stretch for several miles.

From early February to early April 2017, the rover examined four sites near linear dunes for comparison with what it found in late 2015 and early 2016 during its investigation of crescent-shaped dunes. The dark, rippled surface of a linear dune is visible at the center of the view and receding into the distance to the left. The bedrock of the Murray formation, made from sediments deposited in lakes billions of years ago, is in the foreground, along with some components of the rover.

The location, called "Ogunquit Beach," is on the northwestern flank of lower Mount Sharp. Northwest is at both ends of this full-circle panorama; southeast is at the center, where a higher portion of Mount Sharp dominates the horizon.

Among the questions this Martian dune campaign is addressing is how winds shape the dunes into different patterns. Others include whether Martian winds sort grains of sand in ways that affect the distribution of mineral compositions, which also would have implications for studies of Martian sandstones.

The 115 individual images that were combined into this mosaic were acquired by the Mastcam's left-eye camera on March 24 and March 25, 2017, (PST) during the 1,647th Martian day, or sol, of Curiosity's work on Mars.

This mosaic is white-balanced so that the colors of the colors of the rock and sand materials resemble how they would appear under daytime lighting conditions on Earth.

Hubble Captures Volcanic Eruption Plume From Io.

Io is the innermost of the four Galilean moons of the planet Jupiter. It is the fourth-largest moon, has the highest density of all the moons, and has the least amount of water of any known astronomical object in the Solar System.

Saturn hexagonal polar jet stream is the shining feature of almost every view of the north polar region of Saturn. The region, in shadow for the first part of NASA's Cassini mission, now enjoys full sunlight, which enables Cassini scientists to directly image it in reflected light.

Although the sunlight falling on the north pole of Saturn is enough to allow us to image and study the region, it does not provide much warmth. In addition to being low in the sky (just like summer at Earth's poles), the sun is nearly ten times as distant from Saturn as from Earth. This results in the sunlight being only about 1 percent as intense as at our planet. This view looks toward Saturn from about 31 degrees above the ring plane.

The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on Jan. 22, 2017 using a spectral filter which preferentially admits wavelengths of near-infrared light centered at 939 nanometers. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 560,000 miles (900,000 kilometers) from Saturn.