Mysterious Ceres bright Spot-latest updates

This representation of Ceres' Occator Crater in false colors shows differences in the surface composition. Red corresponds to a wavelength range around 0.97 micrometers (near infrared), green to a wavelength range around 0.75 micrometers (red, visible light) and blue to a wavelength range of around 0.44 micrometers (blue, visible light). Occator measures about 60 miles (90 kilometers) wide.

Scientists use false color to examine differences in surface materials. The color blue on Ceres is generally associated with bright material, found in more than 130 locations, and seems to be consistent with salts, such as sulfates. It is likely that silicate materials are also present.

The images were obtained by the framing camera on NASA's Dawn spacecraft from a distance of about 2,700 miles (4,400 kilometers).

Dawn's mission is managed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. Dawn is a project of the directorate's Discovery Program, managed by NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. UCLA is responsible for overall Dawn mission science. Orbital ATK, Inc., in Dulles, Virginia, designed and built the spacecraft. The German Aerospace Center, the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, the Italian Space Agency and the Italian National Astrophysical Institute are international partners on the mission team. For a complete list of acknowledgments, seehttp://dawn.jpl.nasa.gov/mission.

For more information about the Dawn mission, visit http://dawn.jpl.nasa.gov.

Image Credit:

NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA/MPS/DLR/IDA

About the Bright Spots

Ceres has more than 130 bright areas, and most of them are associated with impact craters. Study authors, led by Andreas Nathues at Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research, Göttingen, Germany, write that the bright material is consistent with a type of magnesium sulfate called hexahydrite. A different type of magnesium sulfate is familiar on Earth as Epsom salt.

Nathues and colleagues, using images from Dawn's framing camera, suggest that these salt-rich areas were left behind when water-ice sublimated in the past. Impacts from asteroids would have unearthed the mixture of ice and salt, they say.

"The global nature of Ceres' bright spots suggests that this world has a subsurface layer that contains briny water-ice," Nathues said.

Source: nasa , dawn spacecraft 

Solar and Heliospheric Observatory

   

After 20 years in space, ESA and NASA’s Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, or SOHO, is still going strong. Originally launched in 1995 to study the sun and its influence out to the very edges of the solar system, SOHO revolutionized this field of science, known as heliophysics, providing the basis for nearly 5,000 scientific papers. SOHO discovered dynamic solar phenomena such as coronal waves, solar tsunamis and sun quakes, and found an unexpected role as the greatest comet hunter of all time—reaching 3,000 comet discoveries in September 2015.

    This "Best of SOHO" image by the observatory's LASCO C2 coronograph from Nov. 8, 2000, shows what appears to be two coronal mass ejections (CMEs) heading in symmetrically opposite directions from the sun. A 304Å image from SOHO's Extreme ultraviolet Imaging Telescope (EIT) taken on the same day has been superimposed over the dark disk which blocks the sun so that the LASCO instrument can observe the structures of the corona in visible light. CMEs, which are huge, fast-moving clouds of electrically-charged solar material that contain embedded magnetic fields, can cause geomagnetic storms when they collide with Earth’s magnetic field, causing it to shimmy and shake. The ability to connect the effects of geomagnetic storms—like auroras, GPS and communication disturbances, and geomagnetically induced currents, which can put a strain on power grids—to events on the sun has brought the idea of space weather into the mainstream.

Image Credit: ESA/NASA/SOHO

New Horizons Returns First of the Best Images of Pluto

     The Mountainous Shoreline of Sputnik Planum: In this highest-resolution image from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft, great blocks of Pluto’s water-ice crust appear jammed together in the informally named al-Idrisi mountains. "The mountains bordering Sputnik Planum are absolutely stunning at this resolution," said New Horizons science team member John Spencer of the Southwest Research Institute. "The new details revealed here, particularly the crumpled ridges in the rubbly material surrounding several of the mountains, reinforce our earlier impression that the mountains are huge ice blocks that have been jostled and tumbled and somehow transported to their present locations."

In this highest-resolution image from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft, great blocks of Pluto’s water-ice crust appear jammed together in the informally named al-Idrisi mountains. Some mountain sides appear coated in dark material, while other sides are bright. Several sheer faces appear to show crustal layering, perhaps related to the layers seen in some ofPluto’s crater walls. Other materials appear crushed between the mountains, as if these great blocks of water ice, some standing as much as 1.5 miles high, were jostled back and forth. The mountains end abruptly at the shoreline of the informally named Sputnik Planum, where the soft, nitrogen-rich ices of the plain form a nearly level surface, broken only by the fine trace work of striking, cellular boundaries and the textured surface of the plain’s ices (which is possibly related to sunlight-driven ice sublimation). This view is about 50 miles wide. The top of the image is to Pluto’s northwest.

Credit: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI

Layered Craters and Icy Plains: This highest-resolution image from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft reveals new details of Pluto’s rugged, icy cratered plains, including layering in the interior walls of many craters. "Impact craters are nature's drill rigs, and the new, highest-resolution pictures of the bigger craters seem to show that Pluto's icy crust, at least in places, is distinctly layered,” said William McKinnon, deputy lead of the New Horizons Geology, Geophysics and Imaging team, from Washington University in St. Louis. "Looking into Pluto’s depths is looking back into geologic time, which will help us piece together Pluto's geological history.”

Source: Nasa 

PLANET'S

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What is Neptune like?

Neptune is dark, cold, and very windy. It's the last of the planets in our solar system. It's more than 30 times as far from the sun as Earth is. Neptune is very similar to Uranus. It's made of a thick soup of water, ammonia, and methane over an Earth-sized solid center. Its atmosphere is made of hydrogen, helium, and methane. The methane gives Neptune the same blue color as Uranus. Neptune has six rings, but they're very hard to see.

What does Neptune look like?

Voyager 2 took this picture of Neptune in 1989.

Clouds streak across Neptune.

Neptune is a very cold, windy world.

What is Uranus like?

Uranus is made of water, methane, and ammonia fluids above a small rocky center. Its atmosphere is made of hydrogen and helium like Jupiter and Saturn, but it also has methane. The methane makes Uranus blue.

Uranus also has faint rings. The inner rings are narrow and dark. The outer rings are brightly colored and easier to see. Like Venus, Uranus rotates in the opposite direction as most other planets. And unlike any other planet, Uranus rotates on its side.

What does Uranus look like?

This picture shows Uranus surrounded by its four major rings and by 10 of its moons. This image has colors added to show the different altitudes and thicknesses of clouds in the atmosphere.

Green and blue areas show where the atmosphere is clear and sunlight can get through. The yellow and grey parts have thicker clouds. Orange and red colors mean very high clouds, similar to cirrus clouds on Earth.

The Hubble Space Telescope took this picture of Uranus. You can see bands and a dark spot in Uranus' atmosphere.

What is Saturn like?

Saturn isn’t the only planet to have rings, but it definitely has the most beautiful ones. The rings we see are made of groups of tiny ringlets that surround Saturn. They’re made of chunks of ice and rock. Like Jupiter, Saturn is mostly a ball of hydrogen and helium.

When Galileo Galilei saw Saturn through a telescope in the 1600s, he wasn't sure what he was seeing. At first he thought he was looking at three planets, or a planet with handles. Now we know those "handles" turned out to be the rings of Saturn.

a merit badge with a purple ring in the centera merit badge has bands of yellow and blue showing a general gas gianta merit badge with a planet and an arrow encircling it, showing rotationa merit badge with a sun and an arrow encircling it, showing revolution around the suna merit badge with an orange planet and a thick blue band above ita merit badge with an ancient symbola merit badge that shows an orange planet horizon and a moon in the backgrounda merit badge with a simplified spacecraft made of a square and two rectangles

What does Saturn look like?

A close up view of Saturn's rings. They are grey and tan, and there are spaces in between where you can see the black color of space through them.

The Cassini spacecraft took this picture of Saturn's rings. You can see the grey and tan colors.

A photo of Saturn with its rings at an angle pointing upwards. Next to Saturn are two white dots, which are moons.

This is a picture of Saturn and its moons Tethys and Dione. Voyager 1 took this picture as it passed by.

A photo of Saturn where it is backlit by the sun. Saturn and its rings are nearly black, and the sun is making the edges glow.

NASA's Cassini spacecraft went behind Saturn and took this picture in 2013. You can see seven of its moons and its inner rings. In the background you can also see Earth.

A photo of Saturn looking down on it, showing its rings clearly. The shadow of Saturn falls on the left side of the rings.

A portrait looking down on Saturn and its rings. This picture was made from images taken by NASA's Cassini spacecraft in 2013. It was put together by amateur image processor and Cassini fan Gordan Ugarkovic.

What is Jupiter like?

Jupiter is the biggest planet in our solar system. It's similar to a star, but it never got big enough to start burning. It is covered in swirling cloud stripes. It has big storms like the Great Red Spot, which has been going for hundreds of years. Jupiter is a gas giant and doesn't have a solid surface, but it may have a solid inner core about the size of Earth. Jupiter also has rings, but they're too faint to see very well.

What does Jupiter look like?

Here you can see Jupiter and one of its many moons, Ganymede.

This picture is actually four pictures taken by Cassini put together. The dark spot on the left is the shadow from Jupiter's moon Europa.

This picture taken by Voyager 2 shows the Great Red Spot.


Source: Nasa

For more information visit solarsystem.nasa.gov.