Latest Posts by sharkspaceengine - Page 8

Stormy Night

Picture of the Day - October 20, 2018

Cyclonic storm system dimly lit by a distant sun. Instead of being made of water, this storm and its clouds are made up of dust particles. The planet is a Mars-Like world with a thin carbon dioxide atmosphere and covered in red-colored iron oxide dust

Cold Blue World

Picture of the Day 2 - October 19, 2019

Large hazy blue world rising about an asteroid moon.

Lonely Moon

Picture of the Day - October 19, 2018

Small moon passing in front of a large Super-Earth type planet.

End of the Day

Picture of the Day - October 18, 2018.

Sunset on an alien moon.

Double Moons

Picture of the Day - October 17, 2018

A double transit of two moons across the face of a giant ringed planet.

Picture of the Day 2 - October 17,2018

Another wider angle shot

Earth-Like World

Picture of the Day 2 - October 16, 2018

Here I come across the most Earth-like planet to date. The planet is covered in green vegetation, blue oceans and ice caps at the poles. This planet is located near the galactic core; therefore, the sky is full of bright stars, even more so than globular clusters.

Will we one day explore the worlds of our solar system? How long will this take?

We have a diversity of worlds in our solar system. Majestic places…

Imagine being able to visit Mars and its hostile climate. Imagine being able to visit the moons of Jupiter, observe Io: the volcanic moon, Europa, the frozen moon and Ganymede a moon larger than Mercury itself and that has its own magnetic field. Imagine visiting the moons of Saturn and maybe passing close to your rings… Imagine orbiting or floating through Titan’s atmosphere and closely watching its lakes and seas of methane and liquid ethane. Imagine getting to know the geysers of Enceladus, the valleys of Tethys, and the craters of Mimas… Imagine being able to see the moons of Uranus and have a view of Verona Rupes, the largest cliff of the solar system, located in Miranda. Imagine being able to be in Triton and to be able to observe the cold and azualdo Neptune in the sky…

Starry Night

Picture of the Day - October 16, 2018

The sands of a desert world with the sky full of bright stars. This planet orbits a star located within a globular cluster; therefore, many bright stars punctuate the night sky. The bright star near the lower left is the planet’s sun, which is barely discernible from other stars in the sky,

Dry Desert World

2nd Picture of the Day - October 15, 2018

A Mars-Like desert world covered in dunes of iron oxide dust. A small satellite crosses the face of the planet.

Crowded Worlds

Picture of the Day - October 15, 2018

Alien moon and its parent gas giant, looking towards the sun. This system is located within one of the densely packed globular clusters orbiting Triangulum’s center.

Lunar Shadow

Picture of the Day - October 14, 2018

Small satellite casting its shadow across a gas giant.

Gas Giant Eclipse

Picture of the Day - October 13, 2018

The sky of a large moon orbiting a gas giant right before an eclipse.

Blue Titan

Picture of the day - October 12, 2018.

Blue-tinted Titan-Like world with liquid methane oceans and an extensive ring system.

Saturn’s equinox in 2009 taken by Cassini spacecraft

Credit: NASA/JPL

Blog Changes

I have decided to try a different direction with this blog and instead of posting a whole bunch of pics of single systems, I am going to start posting a pic of a new world every day. That way its frees me to to explore more systems and find really stunning worlds.

Oculus System - Post 4 (Beautiful Outer Giant)

Here we come across the outer-most planet, a large gas-giant with a violet tint. This giant world has more than 5 times the mass of Jupiter and orbits the sun at an average distance of 7.15 AU. The planet has a beautiful ring system, and is surrounded by a system of 10 spherical satellites.

High Resolution Pics

Picture 1 - Outer-most gas giant - Light Enhanced

Picture 2 - Closeup

Picture 3 - Rising Giant

Picture 4 - Another moon shoot

Picture 5 - Rings over the sly

Picture 6 - Ring Closeup

Oculus System - Post 3 (Cratered Wasteland)

The system’s third planet is a nearly airless Mars-sized world, heavily cratered world. The planet orbits 1.19 AU from the sun, has a mass of just 8.6% that of Earth and roughly half of Earth’s diameter. A tenuous carbon dioxide atmosphere clings to the surface with a surface press of just 1/100,000th that of Earth. Surface temperatures can reach the boiling point of water during the day, and fall nearly -300 °F at night.

High Resolution Pics

Picture 1 - Mercury-like planet

Picture 2 - Two small satellites

Picture 3 - A view from a moon

Picture 4 - Setting Sun.

Picture 5 - Broken Crater

Picture 6 - From just 10 km above the surface.

Picture 7 - The Surface

Ultra-Close Orbits of Saturn = Ultra-Cool Science

On Sept. 15, 2017, our Cassini spacecraft ended its epic exploration of Saturn with a planned dive into the planet’s atmosphere–sending back new science to the very last second. The spacecraft is gone, but the science continues!

New research emerging from the final orbits represents a huge leap forward in our understanding of the Saturn system – especially the mysterious, never-before-explored region between the planet and its rings. Some preconceived ideas are turning out to be wrong while new questions are being raised. How did they form? What holds them in place? What are they made of?

Six teams of researchers are publishing their work Oct. 5 in the journal Science, based on findings from Cassini’s Grand Finale. That’s when, as the spacecraft was running out of fuel, the mission team steered Cassini spectacularly close to Saturn in 22 orbits before deliberately vaporizing it in a final plunge into the atmosphere in September 2017.

Knowing Cassini’s days were numbered, its mission team went for gold. The spacecraft flew where it was never designed to fly. For the first time, it probed Saturn’s magnetized environment, flew through icy, rocky ring particles and sniffed the atmosphere in the 1,200-mile-wide (2,000-kilometer-wide) gap between the rings and the cloud tops. Not only did the engineering push the spacecraft to its limits, the new findings illustrate how powerful and agile the instruments were.

Many more Grand Finale science results are to come, but today’s highlights include:

Complex organic compounds embedded in water nanograins rain down from Saturn’s rings into its upper atmosphere. Scientists saw water and silicates, but they were surprised to see also methane, ammonia, carbon monoxide, nitrogen and carbon dioxide. The composition of organics is different from that found on moon Enceladus – and also different from those on moon Titan, meaning there are at least three distinct reservoirs of organic molecules in the Saturn system.

For the first time, Cassini saw up close how rings interact with the planet and observed inner-ring particles and gases falling directly into the atmosphere. Some particles take on electric charges and spiral along magnetic-field lines, falling into Saturn at higher latitudes – a phenomenon known as “ring rain.” But scientists were surprised to see that others are dragged quickly into Saturn at the equator. And it’s all falling out of the rings faster than scientists thought – as much as 10,000 kg of material per second.

Scientists were surprised to see what the material looks like in the gap between the rings and Saturn’s atmosphere. They knew that the particles throughout the rings ranged from large to small. They thought material in the gap would look the same. But the sampling showed mostly tiny, nanograin- and micron-sized particles, like smoke, telling us that some yet-unknown process is grinding up particles. What could it be? Future research into the final bits of data sent by Cassini may hold the answer.

Saturn and its rings are even more interconnected than scientists thought. Cassini revealed a previously unknown electric current system that connects the rings to the top of Saturn’s atmosphere.

Scientists discovered a new radiation belt around Saturn, close to the planet and composed of energetic particles. They found that while the belt actually intersects with the innermost ring, the ring is so tenuous that it doesn’t block the belt from forming.

Unlike every other planet with a magnetic field in our Solar System, Saturn’s magnetic field is almost completely aligned with its spin axis. Think of the planet and the magnetic field as completely separate things that are both spinning. Both have the same center point, but they each have their own axis about which they spin. But for Saturn the two axes are essentially the same – no other planet does that, and we did not think it was even possible for this to happen. This new data shows a magnetic-field tilt of less than 0.0095 degrees. (Earth’s magnetic field is tilted 11 degrees from its spin axis.) According to everything scientists know about how planetary magnetic fields are generated, Saturn should not have one. It’s a mystery physicists will be working to solve.

Cassini flew above Saturn’s magnetic poles, directly sampling regions where radio emissions are generated. The findings more than doubled the number of reported crossings of radio sources from the planet, one of the few non-terrestrial locations where scientists have been able to study a mechanism believed to operate throughout the universe. How are these signals generated? That’s still a mystery researchers are looking to uncover.

For the Cassini mission, the science rolling out from Grand Finale orbits confirms that the calculated risk of diving into the gap – skimming the upper atmosphere and skirting the edge of the inner rings – was worthwhile.

Almost everything going on in that region turned out to be a surprise, which was the importance of going there, to explore a place we’d never been before. And the expedition really paid off!

Analysis of Cassini data from the spacecraft’s instruments will be ongoing for years to come, helping to paint a clearer picture of Saturn.

To read the papers published in Science, visit: URL to papers

To learn more about the ground-breaking Cassini mission and its 13 years at Saturn, visit: https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/cassini/main/index.html

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space: http://nasa.tumblr.com.

Oculus System - Post 2 (Inner-most Planet)

The inner-most planet is a Chthonian Planet, or the core remnant of a large Ice of Gas Giant that lost its atmosphere to the solar winds. The planet is a Super-Earth mass world of 8.4 Earth Masses and a radius of 1.56 Earth’s or 9,954 kilometers in radius. The planet is extremely dense, being made almost entirely out of compressed metals with a thin silicate crust. It has an average density of 12.1 g/cm³. The surface experiences a gravitational force of 3.44 g.

This world has a water-vapor atmosphere that generates a powerful greenhouse effect on the surface. Surface temperatures reach 1,623 °F, and sodium and potassium clouds circle the planet. Pressure on the surface is so extreme, the atmosphere exists as a super-critical fluid, with an atmospheric pressure 6,511 times that of Earth. The atmosphere reflects enough sunlight that the day-side has a bright-white color that drowns out the glowing clouds.

High Resolution Pictures

Picture 1 - Inner-Hell

Picture 2 - Tiny Moon

Picture 3 - Glowing Storms

Picture 4 - Steamy Atmosphere

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

Hot Jupiter

Planets in our own solar system have a wide range of properties. They are distinguished by two basic properties, their size and their orbit. The size determines if the planet can have a life-sustaining atmosphere. The orbit affects the surface temperature and whether there could be liquid water on the planet’s surface.

Hot Jupiters are a class of gas giant exoplanets that are inferred to be physically similar to Jupiter but that have very short orbital period (P<10 days). The close proximity to their stars and high surface-atmosphere temperatures resulted in the moniker “hot Jupiters”.

Hot Jupiters are the easiest extrasolar planets to detect via the radial-velocity method, because the oscillations they induce in their parent stars’ motion are relatively large and rapid compared to those of other known types of planets.

One of the best-known hot Jupiters is 51 Pegasi b. Discovered in 1995, it was the first extrasolar planet found orbiting a Sun-like star. 51 Pegasi b has an orbital period of about 4 days.

There are two general schools of thought regarding the origin of hot Jupiters: formation at a distance followed by inward migration and in-situ formation at the distances at which they’re currently observed. The prevalent view is migration.

Migration 

In the migration hypothesis, a hot Jupiter forms beyond the frost line, from rock, ice, and gases via the core accretion method of planetary formation. The planet then migrates inwards to the star where it eventually forms a stable orbit. The planet may have migrated inwar.

In situ

Instead of being gas giants that migrated inward, in an alternate hypothesis the cores of the hot Jupiters began as more common super-Earths which accreted their gas envelopes at their current locations, becoming gas giants in situ. The super-Earths providing the cores in this hypothesis could have formed either in situ or at greater distances and have undergone migration before acquiring their gas envelopes.

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September 30, 2016: Views of Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko captured by the Rosetta probe during the spacecraft’s final descent.

(ESA)

Starlight

Flame Nebula

Mars: Olympus Mons (desktop/laptop) Click the image to download the correct size for your desktop or laptop in high resolution

Pacman Nebula

Ten Interesting facts about Mercury

Mercury is the closest planet to the sun. As such, it circles the sun faster than all the other planets, which is why Romans named it after their swift-footed messenger god. He is the god of financial gain, commerce, eloquence, messages, communication (including divination), travelers, boundaries, luck, trickery and thieves; he also serves as the guide of souls to the underworld

Like Venus, Mercury orbits the Sun within Earth’s orbit as an inferior planet, and never exceeds 28° away from the Sun. When viewed from Earth, this proximity to the Sun means the planet can only be seen near the western or eastern horizon during the early evening or early morning. At this time it may appear as a bright star-like object, but is often far more difficult to observe than Venus. The planet telescopically displays the complete range of phases, similar to Venus and the Moon, as it moves in its inner orbit relative to Earth, which reoccurs over the so-called synodic period approximately every 116 days.

Mercury’s axis has the smallest tilt of any of the Solar System’s planets (about ​1⁄30 degree). Its orbital eccentricity is the largest of all known planets in the Solar System; at perihelion, Mercury’s distance from the Sun is only about two-thirds (or 66%) of its distance at aphelion.

Its orbital period around the Sun of 87.97 days is the shortest of all the planets in the Solar System.  A sidereal day (the period of rotation) lasts about 58.7 Earth days.

Mercury’s surface appears heavily cratered and is similar in appearance to the Moon’s, indicating that it has been geologically inactive for billions of years. Having almost no atmosphere to retain heat, it has surface temperatures that vary diurnally more than on any other planet in the Solar System, ranging from 100 K (−173 °C; −280 °F) at night to 700 K (427 °C; 800 °F) during the day across the equatorial regions. The polar regions are constantly below 180 K (−93 °C; −136 °F). The planet has no known natural satellites. 

Unlike many other planets which “self-heal” through natural geological processes, the surface of Mercury is covered in craters. These are caused by numerous encounters with asteroids and comets. Most Mercurian craters are named after famous writers and artists. Any crater larger than 250 kilometres in diameter is referred to as a Basin.

The largest known crater is Caloris Basin, with a diameter of 1,550 km. The impact that created the Caloris Basin was so powerful that it caused lava eruptions and left a concentric ring over 2 km tall surrounding the impact crater.

Two spacecraft have visited Mercury: Mariner 10 flew by in 1974 and 1975; and MESSENGER, launched in 2004, orbited Mercury over 4,000 times in four years before exhausting its fuel and crashing into the planet’s surface on April 30, 2015.

It is the smallest planet in the Solar System, with an equatorial radius of 2,439.7 kilometres (1,516.0 mi). Mercury is also smaller—albeit more massive—than the largestnatural satellites in the Solar System, Ganymede and Titan.  

As if Mercury isn’t small enough, it not only shrank in its past but is continuing to shrink today. The tiny planet is made up of a single continental plate over a cooling iron core. As the core cools, it solidifies, reducing the planet’s volume and causing it to shrink. The process crumpled the surface, creating lobe-shaped scarps or cliffs, some hundreds of miles long and soaring up to a mile high, as well as Mercury’s “Great Valley,” which at about 620 miles long, 250 miles wide and 2 miles deep (1,000 by 400 by 3.2 km) is larger than Arizona’s famous Grand Canyon and deeper than the Great Rift Valley in East Africa. 

The first telescopic observations of Mercury were made by Galileo in the early 17th century. Although he observed phases when he looked at Venus, his telescope was not powerful enough to see the phases of Mercury.

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images: Joseph Brimacombe, NASA/JPL, Wikimedia Commons

For more beautiful space aesthetics visit calypsoskelper.tumblr.com

Image of Saturn taken by the Cassini spacecraft in 2007

Credit: NASA processed by Kevin M. Gill