Icarus Project
A group of scientists, with a project called Icarus, are exploring the possibility of harvesting gas from Uranus to fuel a theoretical mission to another star.
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Huge Storm on Saturn
ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) has teamed up with NASA’s Cassini spacecraft to study a rare storm in the atmosphere of the planet Saturn in more detail than has ever been possible before. The new study by an international team will appear this week in the journal Science.
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Io’s subsurface molten magma
New data analysis from NASA’s Galileo spacecraft reveals a subsurface ocean of molten or partially molten magma beneath the surface of Jupiter’s volcanic moon Io.
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Jupiter’s great Red Spot
It is a hurricane twice the size of the Earth. It has been raging at least as long as telescopes could see it, and shows no signs of slowing. It is Jupiter’s Great Red Spot, the largest swirling storm system in the Solar System.
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Saturn’s electric link with Enceladus
NASA is releasing the first images and sounds of an electrical connection between Saturn and one of its moons, Enceladus. The data collected by the agency’s Cassini spacecraft enable scientists to improve their understanding of the complex web of interaction between the planet and its numerous moons.
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Yuri’s Planet
On April 12th, 1961, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Alexseyevich Gagarin, 50 years ago, became the first human in space. His remotely controlled Vostok 1 spacecraft lofted him to an altitude of 200 miles and carried him once around planet Earth. Commenting on the first view from space he reported, “The sky is very dark; the Earth is bluish. Everything is seen very clearly”.
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Stars and Planets
With planet hunting Kepler spacecraft, astronomers have discovered 1,235 candidate planets orbiting other suns since the Kepler mission’s search for Earth-like worlds began in 2009.
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Space Farming
Space seems like a poor place for farming. But thriving plant life near the site of the Chernobyl nuclear accident in the Ukraine suggests that farming in space may not be so very impossible after all.
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Red Lenticular clouds
Lenticular clouds tend to remain stationary. Their longevity and their saucer-like appearance sometimes lead to misidentification as otherworldly spacecraft.
First ever STEREO images of the entire Sun
On Feb. 6th, NASA’s twin STEREO probes moved into position on opposite sides of the sun, and they are now beaming back uninterrupted images of the entire star—front and back.
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