Mar 26, 2012 A new mission to map the gravity field of the Moon. On September 10, 2011 NASA launched the Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) satellites on a mission to the Moon. GRAIL-A and GRAIL-B are nearly identical spacecraft, except that B is designed to follow A around…
Mar 23, 2012 Mercury reveals the violence of planetary genesis. Mercury’s story is probably a complicated tale of extremes. The planet’s surface is heavily scarred, with steep-walled canyons, scarps that rise up several kilometers, and craters that penetrate the crust for several kilometers below the mean elevation. The difference in…
Mar 22, 2012 The telescope that was once thought to be canceled has escaped mothballs and is on track for launch. The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), formerly The Next Generation Telescope, is scheduled to be launched sometime in 2018. According to a report in Aviation Week & Space Technology,…
Mar 21, 2012 Heliophysicists acknowledge the role of plasma in solar eruptions but miss important aspects of its behavior. In Bengal to move at all Is seldom, if ever, done, But mad dogs and Englishmen Go out in the midday sun. — Noël Coward According to a recent press release,…
Mar 20, 2012 Vesta is confirming Electric Universe ideas about planetary scarring. Vesta appears to have experienced some powerful forces. Several craters more than 50 kilometers in diameter mar its surface. Near Vesta’s south pole is a particularly large example that is 460 kilometers wide. Since Vesta has a mean diameter of 529 kilometers…
Mar 19, 2012 The Dawn spacecraft will arrive at Ceres in August of 2015 Ceres is the largest asteroid in the Solar System. The most recent measurement from the Hubble Space Telescope puts it at approximately 975 kilometers in mean diameter. It is so large that it is roughly spherical,…
Mar 15, 2012 Dark mode plasma phenomena exist on the Sun. The image at the top of the page is the most detailed ever taken of the Sun’s chromosphere. The smallest features are 130 kilometers in size. Each spicule is about 480 kilometers in diameter, with a length of 3200…
Mar 14, 2012 Recent X-class solar flares have ignited the polar lights. An electrically active magnetotail (or plasma tail) extends for millions of kilometers from Earth. Charged particles from the Sun, otherwise known as the solar wind, together with ions generated by the Earth, gather in a plasma sheet inside…
Mar 13, 2012 Elongated craters on the Moon are said to come from “grazing impactors.” In one of the earliest Pictures of the Day by the late Amy Acheson, the question was asked, how do you make a crater? When astronomers began to observe the Moon centuries ago, the…
Mar 08, 2012 The MESSENGER space probe is confirming the Electric Universe theory. MESSENGER entered orbit around Mercury on March 17, 2011 after traveling nearly eight billion kilometers. Since that time, it has sent hundreds of close-up images of the surface, revealing features and topography that assure Mercury’s kinship with…
