Space pictures
It has been a couple of years since Cassini was orbiting in Saturn’s equatorial plane before it returned in March of this year. On its journey back from the higher inclination orbits, Cassini flew by the icy Saturnian moon Rhea. These two composite colour pictures of Rhea were take about 30 minutes apart using a combination of clear, green, infrared and ultraviolet spectral filters. Cassini’s narrow and wide angle camera’s were used for these pictures of Rhea.
NASA’s NEOWISE spacecraft discovered this new asteroid in the main belt between Mars and Jupiter. Previously called 2010 ML48, the International Astronomical Union (IAU) recently renamed this asteroid to 316201 Malala in honour of Pakistani Nobel Prize winner Malala Yousafzai. Asteroid 316201 Malala orbits the sun every five years and is composed of a very dark material that is four kilometers in diameter.
Scientists from the European Space Agency’s Planck and Herschel missions along with their colleagues at NASA have put together this map of the entire sky (universe). The black dots that are spread out in the universe are locations of potential galaxy clusters. These were first discovered by Planck and subsequently observed by the European Space Agency’s Herschel mission. The lighter, grey coloured band running through the middle of this picture corresponds to dust in our Milky Way galaxy.
California has always taken pride in being on the cutting edge of technology but in the case of solar, it may be catching up with some of its south-western peers in the United States. The Terra satellite used the on-board ASTER (Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer) imaging system to take these pictures of two solar farms in California. On the left is First Solar’s Desert Sunlight solar generation facility that has recently come on board. It is expected to generate 550 MW of electricity from Riverside County. On the right is the the Topaz solar farm in San Luis Obispo County generating a similar amount of electricity.
It is not often that you would see this gathering of three of Saturn’s many moons in one picture. The Cassini spacecraft was able to capture Pandora, Prometheus, and Pan (from right to left) in this picture using its narrow angle camera. It is also believed that these moons play a role in keeping Saturn’s F-ring narrow. This picture was taken from a distance of approximately 1.6 million miles (2.6 million kilometers) on January 2, 2015 using the visible light spectrum. This view looks toward the sunlit side of the rings.
