Category Archives: Misc

This image of comet Tempel 1 was taken 67 seconds after Deep Impact crashed into its surface. It taken by the high-resolution camera on the mission's flyby craft. I actually did a little work on the Deep Impact mission, and had a tiny amount of code on both the impactor and the flyby spacecraft. Way cool!

Believe it or not, this isn't the Death Star! It is actually Mimas, one of the moons of Saturn. The huge crater on Mimas (known as Herschel) is 80 miles across - almost 1/3 of the diameter of the entire moon. Herschel's walls are 3 miles high, parts of its floor measure 6 miles deep, and the central peak rises 4 miles above the crater floor. The impact that made this crater must have nearly destroyed Mimas. Fractures can be seen on the opposite side of Mimas that may be due to the same impact.

The last of the Titan rockets was launched on October 19th, 2005. This launch ends the Titan program, whose first launch was in 1959. Originally designed for carrying nuclear warheads, the Titan evolved into the workhorse rocket that could lift the heaviest payloads. The Titan was the launch vehicle for many well-known missions - including manned Gemini missions, the Viking missions to Mars, the Voyager missions to the outer solar system, and the Cassini spacecraft now orbiting Saturn.

On October 19th, 1899, 17-year old Robert Goddard climbed a tree in Worchester, Massachusetts, and inventented modern space flight. He dreamt of a machine that could carry men to Mars. From that young age onward, he dedicated his life to building such a machine. By 1926, he had designed, built, and flown the world's first liquid-fueled rocket.

In this picture, Mars is visible in the lower-right hand corner (through the trees), and Venus is just above and to the left of the Moon.

This image was taken by the Cassini spacecraft, which is currently in orbit around Saturn. A lot of people know about Jupiter's large storms - including the Great Red Spot - but not so many know that Saturn has lots of huge storms as well. Storms larger than hurricanes continually dot the upper atmosphere of Saturn, and typically last for months! A view of many storms occurring simultaneously was captured in this image.

A friend recently turned me on to a cover band called "The Dead Hensons". They cover Jim Henson tunes, mostly from the Muppets and Sesame Street. Very cool. Brings back lots of memories. They used to have more free tracks on their website - including Rainbow Connection, Ladybug Picnic, and Mahna Mahna. I'll scour the web a little harder and see if those are still available anywhere, as those were their best tracks. Check out the link - The Dead Hensons!

This is really cool. This guy does drawings on pavement, which look three-dimensional when viewed from a specific angle. It's hard to explain, but a picture is worth a thousand words. Check the link - Virtual Street Reality!

This image was taken by Cassini on a recent fly-by of Saturn's moon Hyperion. It's a false-color image of the moon, in order to bring out more crater detail in the surface. In natural color, Hyperion has more of a reddish tint. The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency.

As storms seem to be in the news a lot lately, I thought this image would be appropriate. It is an image of Jupiter's Great Red Spot, as seen by Voyager 1 when it flew by Jupiter in 1979. This storm has been observed from Earth for hundreds of years, and is big enough to fit three Earths inside of it!

This image of the Cat's Eye Nebula was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. It's a classic planetary nebula, and shows the final phase of a Sun-like star. Astronomers think that this is what could happen to our Sun... in about 5 billion years.