Asteroid 253 Mathilde:'s Large Craters
You're zipping through the Solar System when you pass ... asteroid 253 Mathilde. This actually happened to NASA's NEAR spacecraft just last Friday. The above picture of the previously unresolved asteroid was released just yesterday. Mathilde's ...
NEAR Mathilde
Hey Earth, look what I found! On the way to visiting the asteroid 433 Eros in February 1999, the Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (NEAR) spacecraft flew right by another asteroid: 253 Mathilde last Friday. Shown above is one picture from the ...
Ida and Dactyl: Asteroid and Moon
This asteroid has a moon! The robot spacecraft Galileo currently exploring the Jovian system, encountered and photographed two asteroids during its long journey to Jupiter. The second asteroid it photographed, Ida, was discovered to have a moon ...
Barsoom
"Yes, I have been to Barsoom again ..." begins John Carter in Edgar Rice Burroughs' 1913 science fiction classic "The Gods of Mars". In Burroughs' novels describing Carter's adventures on Mars, "Barsoom" is the local name for the red planet. Mars ...
Mars: Just The Facts
Mars, the freeze-dried planet, orbits 137 million miles from the Sun or at about 1.5 times the Earth-Sun distance. It has two diminutive moons, towering extinct volcanos, an immense canyon system, a thin atmosphere chiefly composed of carbon ...
A Close Encounter of the Stellar Kind
The unassuming star centered in this sky view will one day be our next door stellar neighbor. The faint 9th magnitude red dwarf currently 63 light-years away in the constellation Ophiucus was recently discovered to be on a course toward our Solar ...
A GRB Host?
Where do gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) originate? The most powerful explosions in the universe have recently been located with record accuracy. But do GRBs occur in galaxies or out alone in deep space? This picture taken with the Hubble Space ...
Antares
Antares is a huge star. In a class called red supergiant, Antares is about 700 times the size of our own Sun, 15 times more massive, and 10,000 times brighter. Antares is the brightest star in the constellation of Scorpius and one of the ...
Eruption on Io
There it goes again. Gas and rock were catapulted hundreds of kilometers into space as Jupiter's most volatile moon, Io, showed yet another impressive volcanic display in this just-released photograph by the Hubble Space Telescope. This time the ...
Distant Galaxies
This Hubble Space Telescope image of a group of faint galaxies "far, far away" is a snap shot of the Universe when it was young. The bluish, irregularly shaped galaxies revealed in the image are up to eight billion light years away and seem to ...
