For the first time, astronomers have uncovered evidence of water vapor in the atmosphere of Jupiter's moon Ganymede. On April 17 New Horizons will reach a rare milepost — 50 astronomical units from the Sun or 50 times farther from the Sun than Earth is.
A technique for scanning Mars rocks for microscopic fossils is also being developed to hunt for microbes on Enceladus, Titan, and Europa. Phobos orbits through a stream of charged atoms and molecules that flow off the atmosphere of Mars, new research shows. Plumes of water vapor that may be venting into space from Jupiter's moon Europa could come from within the icy crust itself, according to new research.
New experiments re-create the environment of Europa and find that the icy moon shines, even on its nightside. The effect is more than just a cool visual. New research reveals that Pluto's ice caps are created through an entirely different process than ice caps on Earth. Made of a pair of two-wheeled vehicles, DuAxel is designed to descend craters and near-vertical cliffs on the Moon, Mars, and beyond.
The next full Moon will peak after midnight on Wednesday morning, Sept. Candy-Colored Phobos. Click for more. Fresh Impact on Mars. Uranus Poster - Version B.
The two are tidally locked, with one face permanently turned toward the other. The Pluto-Charon system is considered a binary planet , the only one in the solar system. At miles 1, kilometers in diameter, Charon is about half as wide as Pluto. The center of mass of the two bodies lies outside the surface of the dwarf planet. The pair likely formed at the same time, when two objects collided.
Unlike most of the planets and moons orbiting the sun, the Pluto-Charon moon system is tipped on its side, and Pluto has a retrograde orbit compared to other worlds, both suggestive of a violent beginning. The proto-Pluto and proto-Charon were likely quite different, leading to two different types of worlds.
The remaining debris likely formed the other four smaller moons of Pluto. The south pole of Charon entered polar night in , and will not see sunlight again until New Horizons was able to study some of the nighttime landscape as it was very slightly illuminated by light from Pluto.
The moonlight of Charon also helped scientists to study Pluto once the spacecraft left the daytime side. They gazed back on the dwarf planet in the reflected moonlight of Charon, gathering even more information about the world with the help of its companion. New Horizons revealed an unusual feature, a surprising red formation at Charon's northern pole. This reddish hue comes from Pluto's atmosphere. Pluto itself is too small to hold onto its atmosphere for its lifetime, so the nitrogen, methane and carbon monoxide leave the surface.
This would tend to indicate that the moon is geologically active. The southern hemisphere has fewer craters than the northern and is considerably less rugged, suggesting that a massive resurfacing event has taken place.
This could have been caused by the partial or complete freezing of an internal ocean. This event may have removed many of the earlier craters. One of Charon's most unusual features is the "mountain in a moat". An image from New Horizons showed a mountain rising out of a depression, in a zoomed in view. It appears as a large mountain sitting in a moat. This feature has geologists stunned and stumped. To search this site, type your search word s in the box below and click the search button:.
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