These 100-meter-long streaked slopes may be seasonal saltwater rivers on modern-day Mars, NASA satellite images and research suggest. Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Univ. of Arizona.
Today, through satellite imagery, the administration announced that, “. . . under certain circumstances, liquid water has been found on Mars.”
Graphic: Gizmodo.
Off the coast of New Zealand is a place where spacecraft go to die. So far, 161 ships and counting are resting on the south Pacific ocean floor, most scattered into millions of pieces, because when an airplane hits the sea from 5 miles high, it breaks up, but a crash-landed spaceship is obliterated and can leave debris trails thousands of kilometers long, as was the case with the Mir space station.
Go figure, this site is right near Captain Nemo’s last stronghold, the Nautilus’ secret portage, and H.P. Lovecraft’s sunken city of R’lyeh. Graphic: Gizmodo.
Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech
NASA’s Cassini spaceship has found the first evidence of hot-water chemistry beyond planet earth on Saturn’s moon, Enceladus, making way for implications that it could be hospitable to life.
Fluid lensing removes parallax (displacement) colors from the surface so that a clear 3D image can be rendered.
With the success of LandSat, which has been producing land-based imaging data for the past 40 years, NASA researcher Ved Chirayath at the NASA Ames Research Center is looking to collect data on global warming through the ocean. As one might imagine, mapping the seafloor is much more difficult, mainly because we can’t always see the ocean floor through the surface.
“We have a turbulent, time-evolving surface that’s blurring our view, and essentially what I’m trying to do,” says Chirayath, “is utilize that surface as a part of your telescope or your eye or your optic…so in a way, what was originally sort of a problem — that you had this fluid in the way of what you were seeing — has now sort of actually enabled you to see what is beneath that surface.”
Check out this first-of-it’s kind (so far as we know) video of NASA astronauts Steve Swanson and Reid Wiseman, along with European Space Agency astronaut Alexander Gerst, as they test the phenomenon of water surface tension in microgravity – from inside the water.
“Dunes of the Great Bahama Bank”
NASA first published this photograph thirteen years ago, but only recently have they decided to put it into context. If you’ve ever been to a beach (away from the equator, that is) then you’ve seen the ripple effect left in the sand by an ebbing tide. It might conjure imagery of a windswept desert landscape, which only, at best, gives us a partial understanding of what beauty this underwater landscape might bear for the naked eye.
The space station is treated to 16 sunrises and 16 sunsets per day, so there are endless opportunities to see how the sun transforms the land and ocean below. Shown here, sunlight bounces off the waters surrounding Newfoundland on Aug. 27. Credit: NASA
“I will miss watching the Earth transform from day into night and night into day sixteen times a day,” said Garan.
Reader SidViscosity, who is up for a PhD in Microbial Biology, has just sent us this incredible map of the salinity of the world’s oceans, which according to NASA is the first of its kind.
