The imaging operations center is based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.įor more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit and. (NASA/AP) NASA took a significant step Tuesday toward allowing humans on the moon to live off the land, awarding several contracts to build landing pads, roads and habitats on the lunar. The event would supposedly happen because of a solar storm. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. According to the story, NASA 'confirmed' that the Earth would be experiencing six days of nearly complete darkness from Dec. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. Image scale is 86 miles (138 kilometers) per pixel. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 1.4 million miles (2.3 million kilometers) from Saturn and at a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 152 degrees. The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on Jan. This view looks toward the sunlit side of the rings from about 6 degrees above the ringplane. Scientists are interested in images in this sunward-facing ("high phase") geometry because the way that the rings scatter sunlight can tell us much about the ring particles' physical make-up. Here, the requirement to not over-expose Saturn's lit crescent reveals just how dark the rings actually become. Usually, when taking images of the rings in geometries like this, exposures times are increased to make the rings more visible. That's because they tend to scatter light back toward its source - in this case, the Sun. Its first year will be devoted to studying 55 Cancri e and the airless planet LHS 3844 b, to try and understand "the evolution of rocky planets like Earth," NASA says.ĭistributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.Saturn's main rings, seen here on their "lit" face, appear much darker than normal. The telescope is capable of detecting the presence of an atmosphere, scientists say. The James Webb Space Telescope is expected to be fully operational in "just weeks" and its first observations are expected through the summer, NASA says. "In the evening, the vapor would cool and condense to form droplets of lava that would rain back to the surface, turning solid again as night falls." "In this scenario, the surface would heat up, melt, and even vaporize during the day, forming a very thin atmosphere that Webb could detect," NASA says. One theory is that the planet has "a dynamic atmosphere that moves heat around," NASA says.Īnother idea is that 55 Cancri e rotates to create day and night, but with nightmarish results. Initial views from NASA's less powerful Spitzer Space Telescope show something mysterious is happening on 55 Cancri e, because the hottest spot is not the part directly facing its star. Nothing like it exists in our solar system, NASA says.Īmong the things the scientists hope to discover is if the planet is "tidally locked, with one side facing the star at all times" or if it rotates in a manner that would create day and night. So close that the oceans boil away, rocks begin to melt, and the clouds rain lava." So close that gravity has locked one hemisphere in permanent searing daylight and the other in endless darkness. So close that an entire year lasts only a few hours. "Imagine if Earth were much, much closer to the Sun. "With surface temperatures far above the melting point of typical rock-forming minerals, the day side of the planet is thought to be covered in oceans of lava," NASA reported last week. The planet, called 55 Cancri e, orbits so close to "its Sun-like star" that surface conditions could literally be like the Hell of biblical description: a dimension in a constant state of burning.ĭata show 55 Cancri e is less than 1.5 million miles from its star-1/25 the distance super hot Mercury is from our sun, NASA says.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |