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letheane-deactivated20200121

Stellar maps

Jupiter’s rings, unlike the highly reflective nature of Saturn’s, are relatively faint. Dust from surrounding moons accumulate around the planet to form this delicate ring system. x

lostsplendor

Orion Nebula, 1881 vs. 2011 via Imgur

matchagirl

i cant believe this is a real photo

posttexasstressdisorder

Cool! I missed getting to see it tonight...er...last night.

posttexasstressdisorder

Went to the SpaceWeather site and here’s a few from their gallery:

sci-universe

Every Photo From NASA’s Apollo Missions Are Now on Flickr

The Project Apollo Archive uploaded more than 8,400 high-resolution images the astronauts took during NASA’s Apollo Missions of the 1960s and 70s. The collection includes every photo shot with the Hasselblad cameras on the lunar surface, from Earth and lunar orbit, as well as during the journey between the two. All the photos are unprocessed versions of the original scans.

just--space

One of the first images of Andromeda galaxy taken by Edwin Hubble in 1924

js

wonders-of-the-cosmos

Saturn observed by space probe Voyager 1 on November 16, 1980

Credit: NASA

wonders-of-the-cosmos

Rhea moon

image

humanoidhistory

On March 4, 1979, the Voyager 1 space probe captured this image of Europa, moon of Jupiter, from a distance of about 2 million kilometers 0.2 million miles).

(San Diego Air & Space Museum)

kumarajeet21

What happened in 4 hours is sped to 1 minute. #SuperBlueBloodMoon

humanoidhistory

Planet Saturn, observed by NASA’s Voyager 1 probe on November 16, 1980.

waittherespie

On September 15h, 2017 the Cassini spacecraft will end its 20-year mission by diving into the atmosphere of Saturn.

Goodnight, Cassini.

clio-muse-of-history

September 15

This one is technically not yet history, because at the time of posting, the little craft has about half an hour left to go. That said, let’s proceed.

In 2017, NASA’s Cassini space probe ended its twenty-year mission at Saturn. After a nearly-seven-year-long journey there, it orbited the ringed planet for 13 years and just over two months, gathering copious amounts of information about the planet, said rings, and many of its moons. It landed an ESA probe called Huygens on Titan, the first-ever soft landing in the outer Solar System. It discovered lakes, seas, and rivers of methane on Titan, geysers of water erupting from Enceladus (and passed within 50 miles of that moon’s surface), and found gigantic, raging hurricanes at both of Saturn’s poles.

And the images it returned are beautiful enough to make you weep.

On this day in 2017, with the fuel for Cassini’s directional thrusters running low, the probe was de-orbited into the Saturnian atmosphere to prevent any possibility of any contamination of possible biotic environments on Titan or Enceladus. The remaining thruster fuel was used to keep the radio dish pointed towards Earth so the probe could transmit information about the upper atmosphere of Saturn while it was burning up due to atmospheric friction.

This is us at our best. We spent no small amount of money on a nuclear-powered robot, launched into space, sent it a billion miles away, and worked with it for two decades just to learn about another planet. And when the repeatedly-extended missions were through, we made the little craft sacrifice itself like a samurai, performing its duty as long as it could while it became a shooting star in the Saturnian sky.