This enhanced-color image taken by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter shows ejecta from an impact crater near the Nili Fossae region of Mars. When the meteor hit, it shattered different kinds of exposed rock and mixed them together to create what the science team calls “this wild jumble of colors, each representing a different type of [...]
View PostGeyser Buzz!

Saturn’s icy moon Enceladus is quite possibly the most intriguing place in the entire solar system. This weird little world was once thought to be nothing but an unchanging ball of ice. That was until the robotic spacecraft Cassini discovered giant jets of water ice continually erupting from the moon’s south pole. Saturn explorers now [...]
View Post Cassini, Enceladus, Saturn‘An Elegant Solution’

After technical trouble that knocked the Mars Express spacecraft out of commission for a few months, creative thinking on the part of mission managers brought the ship back to health. One of the fruits of their labors is this amazing new shot. Learn more about the ‘elegant solution’ they came up with.
View Post Mars, Mars ExpressStrange New Worlds

“A book, too, can be a star, explosive material, capable of stirring up fresh life endlessly, a living fire to lighten the darkness, leading out into the expanding universe.” —Madeleine L’Engle, in her Newbery acceptance speech, 1963 A Wrinkle in Time was published 50 years ago today. The novel was the first work of science [...]
View PostShrouded

Saturn’s moon Titan is one of the strangest and most compelling destinations in the Solar System. Aptly named, it’s the largest moon we know of, and shrouded in an atmosphere even thicker than the Earth’s. So thick, in fact, that when the Voyager probes made the first close passes by Titan in the 80s, scientists [...]
View Post Cassini, Saturn, Titan
