NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity took this picture on its 3,786th Martian day on the planet. Taken with its panoramic camera, this approximate true color image shows the rocky terrain of the Wdowiak Ridge and the rover’s previous tracks on the right. This ridge is named after Opportunity science team member Thomas J. Wdowiak who passed away in 2013. It stands on the western rim of Endeavour crater just west of the rim’s main crest line.
The Cassini orbiter used its narrow angle camera to photograph Saturn’s moon Tethys from this interesting angle, at a distance of 1.8 million kilometers. In this picture the 1,062 kilometer wide icy moon appears to be hanging off of Saturn’s A and F rings. Along with the bright white Saturn-facing hemisphere of Tethys, we also get to see how flat Saturn’s rings really are – supposedly only approximately 10 meters high/thick while being 300,000 kilometers across.
While many of Earth were gazing up on October 8, 2014 to catch the total lunar eclipse, NASA’s Messenger space probe was also watching. It used the on-board narrow angle camera – from its far away station, in orbit of the planet Mercury to capture the eclipse. The picture of the left shows the normal view of the Earth and Moon from Mercury (two very bright points in space about 107 million kilometers away). During the lunar eclipse, the Moon disappears from view on Mercury as it makes its passage through the Earth’s shadow (as seen on the right).
What would happen if Spitzer, Chandra(sekhar) and Newton got together to study a supernova? Impossible to say for us but we do have a collaboration of the Spitzer Space Telescope, Chandra X-Ray Observatory and XMM-Newton doing its best to learn more about exploding supernovas. 🙂
This image shows a delicate blend of infrared and X-ray light as a bubbly cloud from an irregular 10 light year wide shock wave, generated by a supernova that would have been witnessed on Earth 3,700 years ago. The remnant itself, called Puppis A, is around 7,000 light-years away from Earth. The bright, lit up areas result from the shock wave slamming into surrounding clouds of dust and gas that fill the interstellar space in this region.
Everyone is doing it so why not Rosetta? Thanks to its onboard Comet Infrared and Visible Analyser (CIVA), this selfie picture was taken by the Philae lander and shows Rosetta spacecraft’s 52 foot long solar arrays, with comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko just 16 kilometers away in the background. This picture is actually a combination of two selfies, of shorter and longer exposures, which when combined are able to show us both the lighter and darker portions of the scene outside Rosetta. This is the last image from Philae before the lander separates from Rosetta on November 12th and makes its rendezvous with the comet that it is circling.
