Last week was a banner week for those of us who love looking at the amazing images captured by the various NASA spacecraft, as they managed to capture three astonishing new images (plus an awesome bonus one we’ve included at the end!) from the likes of Mars, Pluto and Ceres over a two-day span on Thursday and Friday.
Up first is everybody’s favorite dwarf planet, Pluto, as the US space agency released the first pictures of its atmosphere in infrared wavelengths (above). The images, which were produced using data from the Ralph/Linear Etalon Imaging Spectral Array (LEISA) on the New Horizons spacecraft, were captured on July 14 at a distance of approximately 112,000 miles (180,000 km).
According to NASA, the image covers LEISA’s entire spectral range of 1.25 to 2.5 microns, and is divided into thirds, the shortest of which was placed in the blue channel, followed by the green channel and the longest in the red channel. The blue ring which appears around Pluto is the result of the scattering of atmospheric haze particles by sunlight, NASA scientists explained.
This haze, they added, is believed to be a type of “photochemical smog” caused by the action of sunlight on methane and other molecules in the dwarf planet’s atmosphere. As a result, a mixture of hydrocarbons is produced, and those elements accumulate into extremely small particles that scatter the sunlight and produce the blue-hued haze.
Take a virtual fly-over of Ceres in new NASA video
On Friday, NASA released a new animation that allowed the viewer to embark upon a simulated flight over the dwarf planet Ceres. The video, which shows Ceres in enhanced color, was created using images obtained by the Dawn spacecraft and highlights the different surface materials that can be found on the surface of the largest object in solar system’s asteroid belt.
The simulated fly-by, which was compiled by images taken last fall at an altitude of about 900 miles (1,450 km), emphasizes the most prominent craters on Ceres, including Occator and the tall, cone-shaped mountain known as Ahuna Mons. Also visible are blue-shaded areas NASA believes contain younger material such as cracks, pits and flows, the agency noted.
“The simulated overflight shows the wide range of crater shapes that we have encountered on Ceres. The viewer can observe the sheer walls of the crater Occator, and also Dantu and Yalode, where the craters are a lot flatter,” said Ralf Jaumann, a Dawn mission scientist at the German Aerospace Center (DLR), whose framing camera team was responsible for producing the movie.
Mars rover stops to snap a selfie while studying sand dunes
Also on Friday, NASA released the latest selfie taken by Curiosity, as the Mars rover took a short break from scooping and studying sand on the Red Planet to give officials at the agency (not to mention space-science enthusiasts everywhere) a look at how its holding up.
This Jan. 19, 2016, self-portrait of NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover shows the vehicle at “Namib Dune,” where the rover’s activities included scuffing into the dune with a wheel and scooping samples of sand for laboratory analysis. (Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS)
However, as the Huffington Post pointed out, the new image isn’t like the point-and-click kind of selfie that people usually post to their social media accounts. Instead, it is a composite crafted out of 57 individual photographs the rover took of itself next to Namib Dune back on January 19.
Curiosity used the Mars Hand Lens Imagers camera at the end of its arm to snap each of the pics used to create the otherworldly selfie, although the nature of the selfie means that only part of the arm itself can be seen. It is at least the third selfie beamed by to Earth by the rover since it landed on the Red Planet in August 2012, according to the website.
When it’s not snapping photos of itself, Curiosity is in the process of gathering and analyzing the sand at a group of active dunes located in the Bagnold Dune Field site along northwestern Mount Sharp. It used its scoop to collect three sand samples in January, but during the processing of the third one, an actuator did not perform as expected. NASA officials are attempting to find and fix the problem.
BONUS: Martian sand, up close and personal
The Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI) camera on the robotic arm of NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover used electric lights at night on Jan. 22, 2016, to illuminate this postage-stamp-size view of Martian sand grains dumped on the ground after sorting with a sieve.
(Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS)
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Feature Image: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI
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