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SPACE: Mars Odyssey Snaps Beautiful Color-Enhanced Photo of North Pole

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Mars North Pole - NASA

NASA astronomers just shared a colorful new view of Mars that proves the Red Planet also looks great in blue. Using a special infrared camera aboard the Mars Odyssey orbiter, which has been soaring over the Red Planet since 2001, researchers snapped a thermal image of the Martian north pole, digitally colored to highlight the wide-ranging temperatures there. Areas tinted in blue represent colder regions, while warmer areas are tinted in yellow and orange, according to a NASA statement. In this image — which covers an area of the pole about 19 miles (30 kilometers) wide — vast sand dunes … Read more

Hubble Image Reveals New Stars That May Destroy the “Pillars of Creation”

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Pillars Of Creation - NASA

Spearing the sky like monolithic elephant trunks, the “Pillars of Creation” are a vast region of star-forming material located in the Eagle Nebula, about 6,000 light-years from Earth. These tendrils of gas and dust, made colorful by the radiation of bright young stars smoldering within, became a Milky Way landmark thanks to an iconic visible-light image taken by the Hubble Space Telescope in 1995. Now, NASA scientists have shared a new view of the pillars, focusing instead on the infrared radiation normally invisible to human eyes. In the new infrared image (also taken by the Hubble Space Telescope), the colorful … Read more

SPACE: Mars is Made of Swiss Cheese

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Mars

Yeah, ok, so not really. But it sure seems that way in a new image from NASA, which also shows a mysterious pit: This observation from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter show it is late summer in the Southern hemisphere, so the Sun is low in the sky and subtle topography is accentuated in orbital images. We see many shallow pits in the bright residual cap of carbon dioxide ice (also called “Swiss cheese terrain”). There is also a deeper, circular formation that penetrates through the ice and dust. This might be an impact crater or it could be a collapse … Read more

SPACE: New Image of Tethys, Saturn’s “Death Star”

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Tethys - Nasa

NASA says it resembles an eyeball. But it’s hard to look at Tethys, one of the moons of Saturn, and not see the Death Star, especially in the image just released by the space agency: That distinctive mark is the Odysseus crater and its surrounding peaks. NASA said: “Like any solar system moon, Tethys (660 miles or 1,062 kilometers across) has suffered many impacts. These impacts are a prime shaper of the appearance of a moon’s surface, especially when the moon has no active geological processes. In this case, a large impact not only created a crater known as Odysseus, … Read more