What Would It Look Like Orbiting Mars?
If you were an astronaut in orbit around Mars, what would it look like? Here’s an idea.
Full orbit: How an astronaut will view Mars from orbit – YouTube.
Posts from the ‘Planets’ Category
Aug 21
Curiosity’s Descent Onto Mars
Absolutely amazing! First NASA records the descent of the Huygens probe on Titan. Now NASA places a camera on the bottom of the Curiosity Rover for it’s descent onto the Martian surface yesterday evening. What will NASA do next?
NASA Capture’s Venus Transit Across The Sun
Here’s a really cool video of yesterday’s Venus transit across the sun. I managed to get a cool picture myself of the transit on my iPhone in a telescope view finder, which was total luck. But nothing compares to what NASA is capable of capturing from their fleet of satellites observing the sun and that they can have a video like this ready in less than 24 hours.
Europa Has More Water Than Earth
Even though Jupiter’s moon Europa is a fraction the size of Earth’s, it has more water than the Earth itself. I think that’s pretty amazing. And wouldn’t it be a little weird if all that water didn’t produce at least a single microbe of life? Less water produced all the life as we know it on Earth. Just sayin’.
Europa possesses a deep, global ocean of liquid water beneath a layer of surface ice. The subsurface ocean plus ice layer could range from 80 to 170 kilometers in average depth. Adopting an estimate of 100 kilometers depth, if all the water on Europa were gathered into a ball it would have a radius of 877 kilometers. To scale, this … compares that hypothetical ball of all the water on Europa to the size of Europa itself – and similarly to all the water on planet Earth … a volume 2-3 times the volume of water in Earth’s oceans …
Outer Space From The Voyager and Cassini Probes
Here’s a wonderful video made up of pictures from the Cassini and Voyager space probes.
Which is similar to the Cassini Mission video released last year.
CASSINI MISSION from Chris Abbas on Vimeo.
AVIATR: An Airplane Mission for Titan
How awesome would this be: a “drone” flying around the Saturnian moon Titan. Unfortunately it won’t be happening this decade, at least, since it didn’t make the “National Research Council’s ‘Decadal Survey’”. It’s definitely a completely new concept for a NASA mission, and it’s too bad it probably won’t happen in our lifetime.
It Rains On Titan Once Every 1,000 Years
The Cassini mission around Saturn has been gathering data on the moon Titan that would suggest that it rains in some spots only once every 1,000 years.
While the weather system on Titan is similar to Earth, it probably has some significant differences, which Cassini observations have hinted at. Although there were possible storms seen in 2004, there was a huge gap until 2010. After the “storm”, the surface of Titan was changed with a large darkened area that could indicate saturation of liquid on the surface. These ponds seemed to dry up in future observations.
Estimates indicate that regions near Titan’s poles see rainfall for 10-100 hours every Titan year (30 Earth years). But the drier parts of the moon might not see more than a single rainfall every 1,000 years.
It still boggles my mind that we live in a time where we are capable of sending probes like this not only to the main planets around the sun but also to their moons as well. Moons like Titan and Europa are only the tip of the iceberg of moons that that would offer stellar missions with rich scientific returns.
