Enceladus, A Beautiful Moon Of Saturn

is there a smell comparable to space ? i assume we dont know because we would die if we tried to smell it but thats so cool

yeah if humans tried to smell space just like that, we’d die, no doubt about it 

but the smell of space lingers on spacewalk suits, and docking hatches when astronauts open them!

apparently, space itself smells like burning hot metal, or a hot barbeque grill with a slight hint of spent gasoline. The moon, apparently, smells like a gun after its been shot!

The coolest thing about it all is that the smell is actually what are left of dying stars- it’s literally the smell of stardust, and the particles smell like that because they’re so rich in hydrocarbons- something so very essential to life, and speculated by a lot of astronomers and astrobiologists and such to be the very thing life on earth started from!

another neat fact is that no two solar systems smell the same- ours smells like that because our solar system in particular is extremely rich in carbon, and other solar systems and places in the universe will have extremely different smells depending on what elements are most abundant in their system! 

For the first time, NASA’s Curiosity rover has captured a color image of a sunset on Mars.  (NASA via Smithsonian Magazine)

M94: Bursting With Stars

Located about 16 million light-years away, this new Hubble image shows the sparkling galaxy Messier 94. You’ll notice the bright ring (or starburst ring) around Messier 94 where new stars are forming at a high rate. The cause of this star-forming region is thought to be a pressure wave going outwards from the galactic center, compressing the gas and dust in the outer region. The compression of material means the gas starts to collapse into denser clouds. Inside these dense clouds, gravity pulls the gas and dust together until temperature and pressure are high enough for stars to be born. (Image credit: NASA / ESA / Hubble)

So it turns out, Pluto is red.

What color is Pluto? If you search for the dwarf planet on Google, images suggest that it’s a sort of steely blue or gray color. But now, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft is closing in on it, and has learned Mars isn’t the only red planet in our solar system. But the reason it’s red couldn’t be more different from Mars.

Where Could Life Exist?

When NASA scientists announced earlier this year that they had found evidence of liquid water on Mars, imaginations ran wild with the possibility that life could exist somewhere other than here on Earth.

Scientists continue to explore the possibility that Mars once looked a lot like Earth — salty oceans, fresh water lakes, and a water cycle to go with it. That’s exciting stuff.

So where else are they looking? What exactly are they looking for?

There are nine places in our universe where scientists say life is a possibility. The locations range from a smoking hot planet like Venus to a moon that orbits Saturn called Enceladus, which looks a lot like a massive, tightly-packed ball of ice.

All of these places show signs that water is, or at least was, a possibility. They also appear to feature some kind of energy that could produce heat.

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NASA probe spies giant hurricane on Saturn

What is it Like to Visit Jupiter?

Jupiter is the largest planet in our solar system. For some perspective, if it were hollow, more than 1,300 Earths could fit inside of it! The giant planet contains two-thirds of all the planetary mass in the solar system and holds more than dozens of moons in its gravitational grip. But what about a visit to this giant planet?

Let’s be honest…Jupiter is not a nice place to visit. It’s a giant ball of gas and there’s nowhere to land. Any spacecraft – or person – passing through the colorful clouds gets crushed and melted. On Jupiter, the pressure is so strong it squishes gas into liquid. Its atmosphere can crush a metal spaceship like a paper cup.

Jupiter’s stripes and swirls are cold, windy clouds of ammonia and water. Jupiter’s Great Red Spot is a giant storm BIGGER THAN EARTH! This storm has lasted hundreds of years.

Since Jupiter’s atmosphere is made up of mostly hydrogen and helium, it’s poisonous. There’s also dangerous radiation, more than 1,000 times the lethal level for a human.  

Scientists think that Jupiter’s core may be a thick, super hot soup…up to 50,000 degrees! Woah!

The Moons

Did you know that Jupiter has its own “mini solar system” of 50 moons? Scientists are most interested in the Galilean satellites – which are the four largest moons discovered by Galileo Galilei in 1610. 

Today, Galileo would be astounded to know some of the facts about these moons. The moon Io has active volcanos. Ganymede has its own magnetic field while Europa has a frozen crust with liquid-water underneath making it a tempting place to explore for future missions.

When Juno arrives to Jupiter on July 4, it will bring with it a slew of instruments such as infrared imager/spectrometer and vector magnetometer among the half a dozen other scientific tools in its payload.

Juno will avoid Jupiter’s highest radiation regions by approaching over the north, dropping to an altitude below the planet’s radiation belts – which are analogous to Earth’s Van Allen belts, but far more deadly – and then exiting over the south. To protect sensitive spacecraft electronics, Juno will carry the first radiation shielded electronics vault, a critical feature for enabling sustained exploration in such a heavy radiation environment.

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Europa Is Even More Earth-Like Than We Suspected

“The cycling of oxygen and hydrogen in Europa’s ocean will be a major driver for Europa’s ocean chemistry and any life there, just as it is on Earth,” lead author Steve Vance of JPL noted in a statement.

Charting the Milky Way From the Inside Out

NASA - Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) patch. June 4, 2015

Image above: This artist’s concept depicts the most up-to-date information about the shape of our own Milky Way galaxy. We live around a star, our sun, located about two-thirds of the way out from the center. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/R. Hurt (SSC/Caltech). Imagine trying to create a map of your house while confined to only the living room. You might peek through the doors into other rooms or look for light spilling in through the windows. But, in the end, the walls and lack of visibility would largely prevent you from seeing the big picture. The job of mapping our own Milky Way galaxy from planet Earth, situated about two-thirds of the way out from the galaxy’s center, is similarly difficult. Clouds of dust permeate the Milky Way, blocking our view of the galaxy’s stars. Today, researchers have a suitable map of our galaxy’s spiral structure, but, like early explorers charting new territory, they continue to patiently and meticulously fill in the blanks. Recently, researchers have turned to a new mapping method that takes advantage of data from NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE. Using WISE, the research team has discovered more than 400 dust-shrouded nurseries of stars, which trace the shape of our galaxy’s spiral arms. Seven of these “embedded star clusters” are described in a new study published online May 20 in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Image above: (Annotated) This artist’s concept depicts the most up-to-date information about the shape of our own Milky Way galaxy. We live around a star, our sun, located about two-thirds of the way out from the center. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/R. Hurt (SSC/Caltech). “The sun’s location within the dust-obscured galactic disk is a complicating factor to observe the galactic structure,” said Denilso Camargo, lead author of the paper from the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul in Brazil. The results support the four-arm model of our galaxy’s spiral structure. For the last few years, various methods of charting the Milky Way have largely led to a picture of four spiral arms. The arms are where most stars in the galaxy are born. They are stuffed with gas and dust, the ingredients of stars. Two of the arms, called Perseus and Scutum-Centaurus, seem to be more prominent and jam-packed with stars, while the Sagittarius and Outer arms have as much gas as the other two arms but not as many stars. The new WISE study finds embedded star clusters in the Perseus, Sagittarius, and Outer arms. Data from the Two Micron All Sky Survey (2MASS), a ground-based predecessor of WISE from NASA, the National Science Foundation and the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, helped narrow down the distances to the clusters and pinpoint their location. Embedded star clusters are a powerful tool for visualizing the whereabouts of spiral arms because the clusters are young, and their stars haven’t yet drifted away and out of the arms. Stars begin their lives in the dense, gas-rich neighborhoods of spiral arms, but they migrate away over time. These embedded star clusters complement other techniques for mapping our galaxy, such as those used by radio telescopes, which detect the dense gas clouds in spiral arms.

Image above: Astronomers using data from NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, are helping to trace the shape of our Milky Way galaxy’s spiral arms. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul. “Spiral arms are like traffic jams in that the gas and stars crowd together and move more slowly in the arms. As material passes through the dense spiral arms, it is compressed and this triggers more star formation,” said Camargo. WISE is ideal for finding the embedded star clusters because its infrared vision can cut through the dust that fills the galaxy and shrouds the clusters. What’s more, WISE scanned the whole sky, so it was able to perform a thorough survey of the shape of our Milky Way. NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope also uses infrared images to map the Milky Way’s territory. Spitzer looks along specific lines of sight and counts stars. The spiral arms will have the densest star populations.

NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE. Image Credit: NASA

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California managed and operated WISE for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The spacecraft was put into hibernation mode in 2011, after it scanned the entire sky twice, thereby completing its main objectives. In September 2013, WISE was reactivated, renamed NEOWISE and assigned a new mission to assist NASA’s efforts to identify potentially hazardous near-Earth objects. Other authors of the study are: Charles Bonatto and Eduardo Bica, also with the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul. For more information on WISE, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/wise Previous research from Camargo’s team found two embedded clusters far outside the plane of our Milky Way, 16,000 light-years away. A feature story about that work is online at: http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=4497 The new WISE study from the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society is online at: http://mnras.oxfordjournals.org/content/450/4/4150.full?keytype=ref&ijkey=tjeJAezGAmgdXzc Images (mentioned), Text, Credits: NASA/Felicia Chou/JPL/Whitney Clavin/Tony Greicius. Best regards, Orbiter.ch Full article

Any minute now, NASA’s Juno will be entering Jupiter’s orbit. So here is a photo of an aurora on Jupiter.