That raw image (which means it has not been processed to remove instrument/detector artifacts like bad pixels and such) was taken when Cassini was a mere 2000 km (1200 miles) above the moon’s surface. The features are beautiful and plentiful… and it looks like a great place to ski. Bonus: the low gravity would make the experience last longer!

Cassini got an overview of the geysers, too, when it was still more than 500,000 km away:

Remember, these are raw images; that bright "star" just above Enceladus is probably a cosmic ray hit on the detector and not an actual astronomical object.

Over at The Planetary Society blog Emily is, of course, having kittens over the pictures, and has made some stereoscopic pairs of them (though I’ll wait for the red/green anaglyphs; crossing my eyes at my monitor makes my tummy queasy). [Edited to add: in the comments below, BABloggee Alex links to anaglyphs he created. Very cool!]

Stay tuned, because as these images are processed things will only get cooler.

Except:

a) Click to embiggen.

2) I still have not gotten used to these super hi-res pictures. This one is 510 meters across. See the big rock at the top, left of center? The one casting a long shadow? That’s about the size of my yard, and I don’t have a particularly large piece of property. Some of the rocks in this image are smaller than a car.

c) Wow. The good news is, these images still do amaze me. I’m pretty happy I haven’t been spoiled yet. But as more pictures come back from LRO, that might happen. I’m only human — but I do have a large capacity for amazement. Keep ‘em coming!

Image credit: NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University

Holy Haleakala!

On October 9, the LCROSS spacecraft watched as a Centaur rocket booster slammed into the south pole of the Moon, hoping to determine if any water ice exists under the lunar surface. The idea is that over millions of years, comet impacts and other events have brought water to the Moon. Most of it goes away over time, but if any water happens to accumulate at the bottoms of craters at the poles, where the Sun never shines, it can stay put, frozen forever in shadow. By impacting a spacecraft into the Moon, it can eject the ice where it gets hit by raw sunlight. The water breaks down into hydrogen and hydroxyl molecules (OH-), which can be directly detected.

The target crater, Cabeus, has a temperature on its floor of -230 Celsius, cold enough to store ice. The Centaur slammed into it at high speed, making a new crater about 20 meters across and splashing debris over an even bigger area. A plume went up and out of the crater, and it was that tower of ejected material that had the telltale signs of water. The infrared spectrometer on LCROSS definitely detected absorption lines from water, and the ultraviolet spectrometer saw it in emission. Not only that, the emission got stronger with time, which clinches the deal! That’s exactly what you expect by a plume containing water.

Wow.

The amount of water they found in the plume was a couple of hundred kilograms in total, but that indicates there is a lot more still lying on the surface. They don’t know how much exactly just yet; NASA wanted to release this news as soon as they were sure they had definite results, but there is still much to do. Where did this water come from? How long has it been there? How accessible is it to future astronauts? These questions and more will, hopefully, be answered in the coming weeks and months as the data are analyzed more thoroughly. So stay tuned. There’s lots more good news to come!

But getting there is tough, and involves swinging by the Earth three times and Mars once. The final gravity assist will occur on November 13, with closest approach at 08:45 CET (over, roughly, the island of Java) when it’ll be moving past us at 13.3 km/sec (almost 30,000 mph). While it’s passing us by it will observe both the Earth and Moon, doing as much science as it can before heading out into deep space. Specifically, it will add its sensors to those already studying water on the Moon, as well as aurorae on Earth.

You can follow the action on the Rosetta blog. In fact, just the other day they posted this awesome shot of the Moon from Rosetta:

That was taken form a distance of 4.3 million kilometers (2.5 million miles), ten times the distance of the Moon from the Earth. The images as it gets closer will be even cooler.

So stay tuned! This is a very exciting mission, especially next year when it passes Lutetia! I can never see enough closeup pictures of asteroids.

Spacecraft image credit: ESA, image by AOES Medialab

1) Starts with a Bang has a diary of the Ares I-X launch a couple of weeks ago.

2) The 127th Carnival of Space is lying in wait at Next Big Future.

3) The 123rd Skeptics Circle is at Blue Genes Science News, where things have become decidedly Galilean.

So go waste your Thursday afternoon learning stuff.

The Phoenix Mars Lander is sitting at the Martian north pole, its mission complete. Designed to study the history of water on Mars and investigate potential human habitability, it touched down in May 2008. It dug trenches and examined the surface soil of Mars for months, but the Martian winter was inexorable. Eventually, the intense cold forced engineers to shut Phoenix down (as planned), and there it still sits.

The HiRISE camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter took images of Phoenix last year while its mission was still active, in June 2008. Here’s that image:

Phoenix is pretty obvious! The surface there was relatively free of frost at that time. But scientists on Earth decided to get more images, this time during the winter. In July of this year they found Phoenix once again, but the picture is a little different!

First off, the green is not real; this is a false color image. So don’t go thinking they found moss bogs or anything like that. What you’re seeing is the same field as in the first picture, but this time its covered with carbon dioxide frost! Even Phoenix appears to have CO₂ over it, making it pretty difficult to see. I imagine that if they hadn’t taken the earlier picture, it would’ve been a lot harder to pick the lander out from the background.

Spring sprung on the northern hemisphere of Mars a couple of weeks ago, and in another few months scientists will try to contact Phoenix and see if they can wake it up after its lengthy hibernation. It’s a bit of a long shot — the mission wasn’t designed for it — but one thing we’ve learned about the probes we’ve sent to Mars is that they can be incredibly hardy: the two rovers are still operating years after the initial design lifetime. So maybe Phoenix will live again, and get back to work (expect other news sources to say it will rise from its ashes; a bad metaphor given that it’s covered in frost). And if it does, images like the ones above from HiRISE will help us back here on Earth interpret what it’s seeing. The more eyes we have on Mars, the better.