Ten Interesting Facts About Mercury

Picture of the day - November 20, 2018

Dark red nebula rises over a dim set of rings orbiting a gas giant.

Green World

Picture of the Day - October 29, 2018

Lush and green Earth-like planet with life and a large moon orbiting close by.

Staying on Tumblr for now.

I just want to let all my followers know I am staying on Tumblr for now. I appreciate everyone who follows my space engine tumblr and rabbit and shark tumblr.

I am going to however check into pillowfort since i am hearing some good things about it, and might also keep a space engine blog on there as well if I like it.

If the autoflagging gets too bad, however; I might decide to leave tumblr. So that is a wait and see game. But for the foreseeable future I am staying here.

Pictures of the day - November 26, 2018

A system of 6 planet’s orbiting a rare dim carbon star that has swelled into a red giant. All of the planet’s have been roasted by the star. The star has a very low surface temperature; therefore, all of the planets have a red-tint due to the lack of blue colored light.

The outer-most planets form a double planet system which consist of a Mars-like world orbited by an ocean world. The ocean world once being a frozen ice-covered world melted the by expanded sun.

Space Engine System ID: RS 5581-42-4-1201-1122

High Resolution Pictures:

Inner-most world

Massive giant covering the sky

Roasted Ice-giant and its moons

Another burnt world

Outer-most Double Planets

Hurricane

Evaporating Planets

Picture of the Day - October 27, 2018

These three planets (not comets) close to a white giant star losing their atmospheres. The giant star has expanded so fast that all of the inner planets are superheated to nearly 2,000 F.

Not space related, but wanted to see what my space engine followers thought of this question. Hoping to get some good memes out of it.

Shark Question

Are male sharks now going to be banned if their claspers are visible? Also are female sharks with scars on their face going to be banned since that can be considered sexual abuse by a male shark?

Oculus System - Post 1 (Introduction)

We are now inside the giant NGC 604 Nebula. I’ve come across this wide binary system consisting of a F4 giant that is almost 16 times brighter than Earth’s sun and a smaller, but still bright G0V type star more than twice the brightness of Sol. The first worlds I am exploring are the ones orbiting the smaller or secondary of the two stars.

Descriptions of the planet’s to follow in the next post.

Space Engine System ID: RS 1229-171-5-23517-58

High Resolution Pics

Picture 1 - Inner-most Planet

Picture 2 - Surface

Picture 3 - Warm Ice-Giant

Picture 4 - System's fourth planet from a satellite

Picture 5 - Double occultation of two moons

Picture 6 - World with Ethane Oceans

Picture 7 - Setting distant 2nd sun

Mars Express finds evidence of liquid water under Martian pole

A ground-penetrating radar aboard the European Space Agency’s Mars Express satellite has found evidence for a pool of liquid water, a potentially habitable environment, buried under layers of ice and dust at the red planet’s south pole.

“This subsurface anomaly on Mars has radar properties matching water or water-rich sediments,” said Roberto Orosei, principal investigator of the Mars Advanced Radar for Subsurface and Ionosphere Sounding instrument, or MARSIS, lead author of a paper in the journal Science describing the discovery.

The conclusion is based on observations of a relatively small area of Mars, but “it is an exciting prospect to think there could be more of these underground pockets of water elsewhere, yet to be discovered,” added Orosei.

Scientists have long theorised the presence of subsurface pools under the martian poles where the melting point of water could be decreased due to the weight of overlying layers of ice. The presence of salts in the Martian soil also would act to reduce the melting point and, perhaps, keep water liquid even at sub-freezing temperatures.

Earlier observations by MARSIS were inconclusive, but researchers developed new techniques to improve resolution and accuracy.

“We’d seen hints of interesting subsurface features for years but we couldn’t reproduce the result from orbit to orbit, because the sampling rates and resolution of our data was previously too low,” said Andrea Cicchetti, MARSIS operations manager.

“We had to come up with a new operating mode to bypass some onboard processing and trigger a higher sampling rate and thus improve the resolution of the footprint of our dataset. Now we see things that simply were not possible before.”

MARSIS works by firing penetrating radar beams at the surface of Mars and then measuring the strength of the signals as they are reflected back to the spacecraft.

The data indicating water came from a 200-kilometre-wide (124-mile-wide) area that shows the south polar region features multiple layers of ice and dust down to a depth of about 1.5 kilometres (0.9 miles). A particularly bright reflection below the layered deposits can be seen in a zone measuring about 20 kilometres (12 miles) across.

Orosei’s team interprets the bright reflection as the interface between overlying ice and a pool or pond of liquid water. The pool must be at least several centimetres thick for the MARSIS instrument to detect it.

“The long duration of Mars Express, and the exhausting effort made by the radar team to overcome many analytical challenges, enabled this much-awaited result, demonstrating that the mission and its payload still have a great science potential,” says Dmitri Titov, ESA’s Mars Express project scientist.

The discovery is significant because it raises the possibility, at least, of potentially habitable sub-surface environments.

“Some forms of microbial life are known to thrive in Earth’s subglacial environments, but could underground pockets of salty, sediment-rich liquid water on Mars also provide a suitable habitat, either now or in the past?” ESA asked in a statement. “Whether life has ever existed on Mars remains an open question.”

source

Images taken by the Cassini & Voyager spacecraft of Titan, Saturn’s largest moon. Titan is the only moon in the Solar System to have a thick atmosphere and lakes of hydrocarbons (methane and liquid ethane).

To know more about the moon Titan click here

Image credit: NASA/JPL/SSI/Cassini & Voyager ( precessed by: Kevin Gill )

Pillowfort reopens new user registrations at 10 am est

Pillowfort has finally reopened new user registrations which will begin at 10 am eastern. There is a small $5 fee until the site is no longer in beta. I have permanently switched all my posts over there. I’ll be posting a follow up post with my blog link later today