Imagine a frigid world where complex hydrocarbon particles clump together in the thick smog-like atmosphere and fall like black snow onto a light water ice surface. Occasional methane rains and methane springs that emerge from the side of hills wash some of the particles off higher ground and concentrate them in river channels. These rivers…

Opportunity continues to study the first meteor discovered on another planet. NASA released a color image of the metallic body sitting in martian sands. The pitted meteorite is composed of iron and nickel, just like metallic meteorites that land on the Earth. Yet to be determined is how rare the object is, whether or not…

The Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity recently got a look at the discarded hardware from its initial descent to the surface of the Red Planet. It drove up to and examined the heat shield and other debris. Engineers are eager to study the data to learn more about the descent and landing.

It should not be too surprising that meteorites are not just rocks that have fallen from space to a final resting place on the surface of the Earth. Meteoroids fall on bodies throughout our solar system. Opportunity, the rover currently at work on Mars, recently came across a metallic-looking rock lying in the desert sands…

One of the early promises of the Information Age was contained in the adage “information wants to be free.” The massive transfer of data to digital formats and the Internet, the rapid explosion in memory capacity and communication bandwidth, and the falling price of technology are related trends reshaping humankind’s relationship with knowledge. The latest…

A new composite image from Titan appears to show a shoreline where river channels or canyons empty into a black sea. Huygens took the image as it was drifting down toward the surface. Scientists have not yet been able to confirm whether or not the black sea-like region and apparent river channels are full of…

Dr. Lyn Doose, Co-Investigator of the Descent Imager-Spectral Radiometer (DISR) instrument on the Huygens probe, presented to a packed crowd tonight at the University of Arizona’s Kuiper Space Sciences Building the first scientific results from Friday’s successful landing on Titan. Highlights of his speech included the display of the first images from the surface of…

Elated scientists are now examining the data sent from the surface of Titan by the Huygens probe. The first image was displayed in special video coverage from the European Space Operations Centre (ESOC) in Darmstadt, Germany. The image appears to show a drainage system emptying into a dark body, though this has not yet been…

Astronomers believe they have captured the first-ever image of a planet outside our own solar system. This extrasolar planet orbits a brown dwarf called 2MASSWJ 1207334-393254 (or 2M1207 for short.) The image was captured by the Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer (NICMOS) on the Hubble Space Telescope. The first extrasolar planet was discovered in…

It might seem to be old news, but our own Moon has got a lot left to tell us. The European Space Agency’s probe SMART-1 successfully used its experimental ion drive engine to loop out to the Moon and is now beginning to snap new pictures. One of the mission objectives is to determine whether…

The dark material on Iapetus would look dark brown to the human eye, according to this near-true color image of the Saturnian moon. Why the moon is stained this color closer to a mysterious equatorial ridge and less so at higher latitudes remains a mystery.

Okay, get those 3D glasses out. Iapetus, the strangely-shaped and strangely-colored moon with strange landforms that defy current scientific explanation, gets the stereo treatment, with never before seen basins and craters.

Planetary science is never boring and often very surprising. Take for instance the new images sent back by the Cassini space probe of Saturn’s moon Iapetus. The moon has always been mysterious since the first Voyager images revealed a light hemisphere and a dark hemisphere. The contrast cannot be overemphasized: the dark side only reflects…

Images taken by various space probes are made available to the public soon after they are uploaded to Earth, but because of the sheer number received, most images remain in raw form until they can be calibrated and corrected. These raw images are full of artifacts from data loss, cosmic rays, and dust on the…

The Cassini spacecraft flew by the Saturnian moon Iapetus on December 31, 2004 and snapped some images. The moon is recognizable because of it has one bright side and one dark side, perhaps due to sweeping up debris on its leeward side as it orbits Saturn. Cassini will pass much closer to the moon around…