Exciting news: NASA’s OSIRIS-REx, the first United States spacecraft to return samples from an asteroid has successfully touched down the Asteroid Bennu. The touchdown and sample collection occurred on October 20, 2020, at about 22:12 UTC.
Category Archives: Solar System
Oceans of the Solar System
Created by the Universidad de Puerto Rico en Arecibo (the University of Puerto Rico at Arecibo) scientists, this amazing infographic shows the volumes of the oceans of the Solar System. The unit used is the volume of the liquid water on Earth, so the ocean volumes of the other planetary objects are given by the …
Moon passing in front of Mars in this spectacular video
On September 6, 2020, French astrophotographer Thierry Legault (@ThierryLegault) went to the South of Lisbon to capture the event of the Moon passing in front of Mars. The result is this spectacular video, titled “Occultation of Mars by the Moon” by Legault himself.
Life on Venus? Astronomers detected phosphine which is a strong signature of life
Life on Venus? Astronomers have detected the first sign of life in the deadly clouds of Venus. They found phosphine which displays a strong signature of life. If we can detect life itself soon, this might be the most exciting news in history.
Backyard Worlds: NASA is asking for volunteers to help find the hypothetical Planet 9
Some astronomers think in our outer solar system there’s a giant, undiscovered world hiding and they call it (for obvious reasons) Planet Nine. Whether it exists, it could be 5-10 times the size of the Earth and orbit Sun hundreds of times farther away than Earth orbiting Sun. Now, a NASA citizen science project called …
Ancient Mars: how Mars looked like when there was liquid water on its surface
The Planetary Society published an amazing animation showing the ancient Mars – how the red planet looked like when there was liquid water on its surface.
Saturn and its rings: Hubble’s spectacular new photo (July 4, 2020)
NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope took this spectacular photo of Saturn and its rings on July 4, 2020, when the ringed gas giant was 839 million miles (1,35 billion kilometers) from Earth.
Comet NEOWISE and noctilucent clouds – something we’ve never seen before
Russian space agency Roscosmos published spectacular photos of Comet NEOWISE (C/2020 F3) and noctilucent clouds or polar mesospheric clouds (PMCs) above our beautiful planet Earth. This is something we’ve never seen before (a comet and ).
Spectacular comet photo from the ISS
Russian cosmonaut Ivan Vagner published a spectacular comet photo on his Twitter account (@ivan_mks63). He tweeted both in Russian and in English and said “During the next revolution I tried to capture the C/2020 F3 (NEOWISE) comet a bit closer, the brightest one over the last 7 years. Its tail is quite clearly visible from …
How the moon was formed? An epic exploration of lunar origin theories
How the moon was formed? The most widely accepted theory of the Moon’s origin is known as the Giant Impact Hypothesis. The standard giant impact hypothesis, sometimes called the Big Splash, or the Theia Impact suggests the Mars-sized body, called Theia, impacted Earth, creating a large debris ring around Earth, and the Moon formed out …
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