CosmosPlasma

"We live on a hunk of rock and metal that circles a humdrum star that is one of 400 billion other stars that make up the Milky Way Galaxy which is one of billions of other galaxies which make up a universe which may be one of a very large number, perhaps an infinite number, of other universes. That is a perspective on human life and our culture that is well worth pondering." - Carl Sagan

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Antares star and Scorpius Constellation by César Cantú

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Mars’ Olympus Mons, The Tallest Mountain in our Solars System, as Seen From Orbit

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Animations of Saturn’s aurorae

Earth isn’t the only planet in the solar system with spectacular light shows. Both Jupiter and Saturn have magnetic fields much stronger than Earth’s. Auroras also have been observed on the surfaces of Venus, Mars and even on moons (e.g. Io, Europa, and Ganymede). The auroras on Saturn are created when solar wind particles are channeled into the planet’s magnetic field toward its poles, where they interact with electrically charged gas (plasma) in the upper atmosphere and emit light. Aurora features on Saturn can also be caused by electromagnetic waves generated when its moons move through the plasma that fills the planet’s magnetosphere.  The main source is the small moon Enceladus, which ejects water vapor from the geysers on its south pole, a portion of which is ionized. The interaction between Saturn’s magnetosphere and the solar wind generates bright oval aurorae around the planet’s poles observed in visible, infrared and ultraviolet light. The aurorae of Saturn are highly variable. Their location and brightness strongly depends on the Solar wind pressure: the aurorae become brighter and move closer to the poles when the Solar wind pressure increases.

Credit: ESA/Hubble (M. Kornmesser & L. Calçada)

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Solar Flare, April 12th 2013, 22:00 UTC.

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Hurricane Felix

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Spacecraft History: Vostok 1

Vostok 1 (Russian: Восток-1, East 1 or Orient 1) was the first spaceflight in the Vostok program and the first human spaceflight in history. The Vostok 3KA spacecraft was launched on April 12, 1961. The flight took Yuri Gagarin, a cosmonaut from the Soviet Union, into space. The flight marked the first time that a human entered outer space, as well as the first orbital flight of a manned vehicle. Vostok 1 was launched by the Soviet space program, and was designed by Soviet engineers guided by Sergei Korolev under the supervision of Kerim Kerimov and others.

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NASA Budget Over The Years

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Curiosity self portrait

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1962 models of the moon.

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A 15-times magnified image of a dinosaur bone from the Jurassic period.

Image by Norm Barker, Johns Hopkins University, School of Medicine.

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Control room. Text on the left side monitor: NASA Lewis Research Center 9X15 LOW SPEED WIND TUNNEL. 11:19:28 3/6/1989

Photo credit: NASA/Glenn Research Center via archive.org

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Wandering Stars

To ancient astronomers, the stars seemed fixed, moving across the sky during the night but always in fixed constellations—except for five bright points that appeared to wander among the stars. In the geocentric model of the solar system, where everything orbits the Earth, the paths of these five seemed strange, with several even backtracking and looping around in a retrograde motion. Today, we know that our solar system is heliocentric and all planets orbit the sun, so the retrograde motions are only perspective issues, but the ancient names for the planets remain. The Greeks called them ‘planets’, meaning wanderers, and the five were originally named after Roman deities: Mercury, messenger of the gods, Venus, the goddess of love and beauty, Mars, the god of war, Jupiter, king of the gods, and Saturn, father of Jupiter and god of agriculture.

(Image Credit: NASA)

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The orbits of the moons and planets form a 4-dimensional fractal helix in spacetime.

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Patterns on Mars