by Jonathan Nally | Sep 29, 2021 | Astronomy, News, Planets
Above: Jupiter and its Great Red Spot, with the moon Europa on the left. The image was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope on 25 August 2020, when the planet was 653 million kilometres from Earth. Image credit: NASA, ESA, A. Simon (Goddard Space Flight Center), and M....
by Jonathan Nally | Jul 31, 2020 | Astronomy, Planets, Space missions
NASA’S LATEST AND MOST AMBITIOUS MISSION to Mars was successfully launched in the early hours of Friday, July 31 (Sydney time), ascending on an Atlas V rocket from Space Launch Complex 41 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. Carrying a rover called...
by Jonathan Nally | Jul 3, 2020 | Amateur astronomy, Astronomy, Planets
ABOVE: An artist’s impression showing a Neptune-sized planet in the ‘Neptunian Desert’. It is extremely rare to find an object of this size and density so close to its star. Credit: University of Warwick/Mark Garlick. THE SURVIVING CORE OF A GAS GIANT...
by Jonathan Nally | Feb 4, 2020 | Astronomy, Planets, Telescopes
Above: NEID team members installing a large prism into the spectrometer. NEID should have three times the precision of previous radio velocity spectrometers, enabling it to discover more Earth-mass exoplanets. Courtesy the NEID team. ASTRONOMERS HOPE A NEW...
by Jonathan Nally | Dec 20, 2019 | News, Planets, Space missions
Above: The aeroshell and heat shield for the Mars 2020 mission. Image courtesy Lockheed Martin. The contraption in the foreground of this image looks a bit like the Jupiter 2 spaceship from the TV series Lost in Space, but it is in fact part of the aeroshell for the...
by Jonathan Nally | Aug 13, 2019 | Astronomy, Planets
The image above shows amazing detail and colour in Jupiter’s cloud bands, as captured by the Hubble Space Telescope. The planet’s famous Great Red Spot (GRS) — about twice the diameter of Earth — is prominent. The giant anticyclone is nestled between two bands of...