Solar System
Charley Kohlhase has been our ambassador to the planets
Charley Kohlhase officially ‘retired’ from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in 1998. At his retirement party, a recording was played of Carl Sagan, who had died two years previously. ‘…. His voice suddenly, pleasingly rang through the room. From the afterlife, Sagan implored, “Charley Kohlhase’s name should be as well known as Michael Jordan’s!”’ (from ‘Ambassadors …
Deep Space Network: Finding the signal for 50 years
Robotic missions exploring our solar system have wowed the world with their discoveries and especially the images they return. But even the most sophisticated spacecraft is useless until the science and engineering it gathers makes it back to Earth. NASA’s one of a kind collection of massive dishes around the world makes that possible. The …
Eight essential facts about NASA’s Deep Space Network
1) As the World Turns: The DSN is Earth’s only global spacecraft communication network The Deep Space Network has three facilities – at Goldstone, Calif.; near Madrid, Spain; and Canberra, Australia, all with multiple parabolic dish antennas, including one dish each that is 230 feet (70 meters) across. Located about 120 degrees apart around Earth, the …
Rosetta is deciphering comet’s tale
Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko (I’ll call it Comet 67P) has been minding its own business for billions of years as it quietly looped around the Sun every 6.5 years. Discovered in 1969 by astronomers Klim Ivanovych Churyumov and Svetlana Ivanovna Gerasimenko, it spins around on its own axis every 12 hours and is about 2 miles across. …
Rosetta: First mission to orbit and land on a comet
Rosetta is the first mission designed to orbit and land on a comet. It consists of an orbiter, carrying 11 science experiments, and a lander, called ‘Philae’, carrying 10 additional instruments, for the most detailed study of a comet ever attempted. Rosetta gets its name from the famous Rosetta stone that led to the deciphering …
SDO images ‘jack-o’-lantern’ Sun
Active regions on the sun combined to look something like a jack-o-lantern’s face on Oct. 8, 2014. The active regions appear brighter because those are areas that emit more light and energy — markers of an intense and complex set of magnetic fields hovering in the sun’s atmosphere, the corona. This image blends together two …
How to photograph the planets
For the last couple of issues our object spotlights have been located within our solar system. It is quite easy to see them, Jupiter and the Moon in particular, but quite difficult to image them. The term for imaging the solar system is Planetary Imaging despite the fact that both the planets, the moon and …
Cassini at Saturn: A decade exploring the ringed system
Cassini: Amazing images and even more amazing science The Cassini orbiter has been in orbit around Saturn since June 2004. Launched aboard a Titan IVB rocket from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on October 15, 1997, it was originally dubbed Cassini-Huygens as the Huygens probe was carried along with Cassini to the Saturnian system. The …
Venus Express gets ready to take the plunge
After eight years in orbit, ESA’s Venus Express has completed routine science observations and is preparing for a daring plunge into the planet’s hostile atmosphere. Venus Express was launched on a Soyuz–Fregat from the Russian Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on 9 November 2005, and arrived at Venus on 11 April 2006. It has been orbiting …
‘Club sandwich’ of oceans and ice may exist within Jovian moon
The largest moon in our solar system, a companion to Jupiter named Ganymede, might have ice and oceans stacked up in several layers like a club sandwich, according to new NASA-funded research that models the moon’s makeup. Previously, the moon was thought to harbor a thick ocean sandwiched between just two layers of ice, one …