Category Astronomy/Space

NASA’s Cassini spacecraft paused during its final close flyby of Enceladus to focus on the icy moon’s craggy, dimly lit limb, with the planet Saturn beyond. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute

Cassini passed Enceladus at a distance of 3,106 miles on Dec. 19, at 9:49 a.m. PST. “This final Enceladus flyby elicits feelings of both sadness and triumph,” said Earl Maize, JPL. “While we’re sad to have the close flybys behind us, we’ve placed the capstone on an incredible decade of investigating one of the most intriguing bodies in the solar system.”

Cassini will continue to monitor activity on Enceladus from a distance, through the end of its mission in Sept. 2017. Future encounters will be much farther away – at closest, >4X farther than this latest encounter...

This self-portrait of NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity combines dozens of exposures taken by the rover’s Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI) during the 177th Martian day, or sol, of Curiosity’s work on Mars (Feb. 3, 2013), plus three exposures taken during Sol 270 (May 10, 2013) to update the appearance of part of the ground beside the rover. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

The first U.S. production in nearly 30 years of a specialized fuel to power future deep space missions has been completed by researchers at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Tennessee. The production of 50 grams of plutonium-238 -roughly the mass of a golf ball – marks the first demonstration in the US since the Savannah River Plant in South Carolina ceased production in the late 1980s.

Radioisotope ...

Because they are so distant from the Earth, Centaurs appear as pinpricks of light in even the largest telescopes. Saturn’s 200-km moon Phoebe, depicted in this image, seems likely to be a Centaur that was captured by that planet’s gravity at some time in the past. Until spacecraft are sent to visit other Centaurs, our best idea of what they look like comes from images like this one, obtained by the Cassini space probe orbiting Saturn. NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft, having flown past Pluto six months ago, has been targeted to conduct an approach to a 45-km wide trans-Neptunian object at the end of 2018. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute

The discovery of hundreds of giant comets in the outer planetary system over the last 2 decades means that these objects pose a much great...

Magnetic field lines (purple) are twisted as they are dragged inward toward a swirling, dusty disk surrounding a young star in this artist’s conception. CREDIT: Bill Saxton, NRAO/AUI/NSF.

Using new images with unprecedented detail, scientists have found material rotating around a very young protostar probably has dragged in and twisted magnetic fields from the larger area surrounding the star. The discovery, made with the Very Large Array VLA) radio telescope, has important implications for how dusty disks – the raw material for planet formation – grow around young stars.

The scientists studied a young protostar 750 light-years from Earth in constellation Perseus...