Titan’s Nile River Valley

Fascinating image from Nasa’s Cassini probe at Saturn, where we’ve previously watched the weather on Titan.  [Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASI.]  North is to the right in this view. From the JPLnews press release “Titan is the only place we’ve found besides Earth that has a liquid in continuous movement on its surface,” said Steve Wall, the radar deputy team lead, based at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. “This picture gives us a snapshot of a world in motion. Rain falls, …

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Lake Vostok: “Admit it, it sounds just like a thousand horror-movie setups.”

That was the Professor’s not entirely inaccurate comment this time last year, when a Russian team came up just short in their attempt to reach Lake Vostok – the largest sub-glacial freshwater lake on Earth. The project to drill down to the lake, which covers 16 square kilometres and has been sealed under approximately 3,750m of ice in the Antarctic for around 15 million years, began over 20 years ago. The Russian team returned to the drill site during the recent Antartic summer and, as the …

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“Opportunity on Mars – 8 years and counting!”

Nasa’s Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity landed in Eagle Crater on Mars on Jan. 25, 2004, Universal Time, three weeks after its rover twin, Spirit, had landed halfway around the planet.  Opportunity completed its three-month prime mission in April that year, everything else has been bonus, extended missions.  Spirit is no longer with us.  But Opportunity carries on. [Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Cornell/Arizona State Univ.] This mosaic of images taken in mid-January 2012 shows the windswept vista northward (left) to northeastward (right) from the location …

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Kepler-22b: “This is a major milestone on the road to finding Earth’s twin”

By the time its last catalogue of exoplanet candidates was released in February,  Nasa’s Kepler space observatory, launched in March 2009, first light in April 2009, had identified 1,235 planetary candidates – and 54 candidates within the habitable zone. The Kepler team have now identified 2,326 planet candidates – of those, 207 are approximately Earth-size, 680 are super Earth-size, 1,181 are Neptune-size, 203 are Jupiter-size and 55 are larger than Jupiter.  And there are now 48 planet candidates in their star’s habitable zone There …

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“Look again at that dot.”

As Curiosity heads to Mars, and Voyager continues to go boldly further than ever, the BBC reports on some speculative assessments of potentially habitable locations elsewhere in the galaxy.  A timely reminder, then, from the Guardian’s GrrlScientist of our pale blue dot in this short video tribute to Carl Sagan. Carl Sagan (1934-1996), Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space [1997: Amazon UK; Amazon US]. From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any …

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Curiosity heads to Mars

Nasa’s Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) successfully launched from the Kennedy Space Centre earlier today on an Atlas 5 rocket at the start of its eight and a half month journey to Mars.  With its massive 900kg rover, Curiosity, it’s being billed as “the biggest and best Mars mission yet.” Mike Meyer is the lead scientist on Nasa’s Mars exploration effort: “MSL plays a central role in a series of missions of looking at Mars and determining whether or not it has the potential for life. …

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Chaos on Europa

And that could be a good thing. [Image credit: Nasa/JPL. Image reprocessed by Ted Stryk].  As a BBC report notes, Nasa scientists have published their latest thinking on the chaos terrains of Jovian satellite Europa. [All hail our friend and lord, Jupiter! – Ed] *ahem*.  It suggests that the “chaos terrains form above liquid water lenses perched within the ice shell as shallow as 3 kilometres”.  Here’s a cross-section view through the surface of Europa showing the suspected “Great Lake.”  [Image credit: Britney Schmidt/Dead Pixel …

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Opportunity at Endeavour

Last seen, on Slugger, at the edge of the football-field sized crater Santa Maria, Nasa’s Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity has arrived at its next destination – the 22km wide crater Endeavour.  3 years and 13 miles from its first destination, Victoria crater. [Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Cornell/ASU] A portion of the west rim of Endeavour crater sweeps southward in this color view from NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity. This crater — with a diameter of about 14 miles (22 kilometers) — is more …

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“these could be the first known Martian locations with liquid water”

A BBC report notes the fascinating interpretation being made of some more wondrous images from the HiRISE camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.  MRO image gallery here.    From JPLnews Here’s an animated gif showing the features of interest. This series of images shows warm-season features that might be evidence of salty liquid water active on Mars today. Evidence for that possible interpretation is presented in a report by McEwen et al. in the Aug. 5, 2011, edition of Science. These images come …

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