The European Space Agency has narrowed down their original ten landing sites for the Rosetta mission on comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, down to five final landing sites (A, B, C, I and J). Landing site C was chosen as a backup site for Philae’s planned November 11, 2014 landing over the other potential landing sites because it had a higher level of illumination and fewer boulders.
The Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity’s navigation camera (Navcam) took this picture of the martian landscape on the 3,749th day of the rover’s mission on Mars. This south looking picture nicely captures windblown lines of sand on the surface and the western ridge of Endeavour Crater. On this day’s drive, the rover covered 338 feet along the outer slope of the crater’s rim.
It may be hard to spot it, but the tiny white dot in the lower right part of the photo is Mimas, one of Saturn’s moons. Discovered by William Herschel in 1789, Mimas is named after the son of Gaia in Greek mythology. The Cassini Orbiter took this picture using its wide angle camera at a distance of over a million miles. And the bright speck that is Mimas just happened to be perfectly positioned against the shadow of Saturn’s rings. This view looks toward the sunlit side of the rings from about 10 degrees above the ringplane.
The world has been following the volcanic eruptions in Iceland and the subsequent earthquakes and ash clouds that are likely to follow. These are both big concerns with the latter potentially having a significant impact to airline travel through large parts of the northern hemisphere.
On September 1st, the Advanced Land Imager (ALI) on NASA’s Earth Observing 1 (EO-1) spacecraft observed from orbit the eruption of the Bardarbunga volcano at Holuhraun, Iceland. This image captures the kilometer long fissure from which lava is erupting both a channeled and more expansive lava flows.
NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) has been dutifully mapping and photographing the Mars surface since its arrival at the red planet in 2006. This picture shows the very shallow Schiaparelli Crater (named after Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli), which is a 460 kilometer (286 mile) wide structure on Mars. Most of the floor of the Schiaparelli crater is covered by a thin layer of dust, but in places where there are patches of dark sand, there is also well-exposed bedrock.
