Kepler crater on the moon is approximately 32 kilometers (20 miles) in diameter located at the lunar bearing 8.1°N, 322.0°E. It is named after the prolific German astronomer Johannes Kepler, famous for his three laws of planetary motion. This picture, taken by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), also shows a boulder that was ejected out onto its continuous ejecta blanket by the energy of this impact.
Named after the classic 17th century Spanish book, the celestial Don Quixote was initially believed to be a large asteroid in deep space. But with the help of the Spitzer Space Telescope, astronomers discovered that what they initially believed was an asteroid was in fact a comet. The infrared imagery from Spitzer showed that Comet Don Quixote had the telltale features of a comet – a distinctive head and a (trailing) tail. In the above NASA pictures, the bright areas around Comet Don Quixote are stars and the horizontal line is from artifacts caused by image processing.
“Thou hast seen nothing yet.”
– Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote
The joint NASA/ESA Cassini-Huygens mission made some interesting discoveries on Jupiter, on the way to its final destination which was Saturn. This January 2001 composite infrared picture shows Jupiter’s south pole (left) and north pole (right). The bright green spots are the warmer areas, believed to be organic matter, specifically acetylene (ethyne; C2H2). This research allowed scientists to better understand the chemical interactions between sunlight and molecules in Jupiter’s stratosphere.
Not the human kind but birth of a celestial star.
The birth of a star is a fascinating process that has and will long continue to draw the attention of astronomers and scientists. This picture was based on the observations of NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope and Atacama Large Millimeter/sub-millimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile, and gave us a first look at a newborn star. Combination of Spitzer and ALMA are able to capture the infrared and sub-millimeter light spectrums; thus a allowing a rare glimpse inside the the dark cosmic cloud around Herbig-Haro (HH) object 46/47. The blue areas show gas energized by out flowing jets representing the shorter wavelength light, with the blueish-green areas caused by hydrogen gas. The redder areas are the longer wavelength and are created by excited carbon monoxide gas in this new star.
NASA’s Deep Space probe took this picture of Comet Tempel 1 (designation 9P/Tempel), which is a comet in the Jupiter system. It was taken by Deep Space probe’s impactor targeting sensor, about five minutes before it deliberately impacted/crashed with Comet Tempel 1. This comet is relatively small in size, 7.6 km × 4.9 km in diameter and has a rotational period of 40.7 hours.
