On 6 June, the high-resolution stereo camera on ESA's Mars Express revisited the Argyre basin as featured in our October release, but this time aiming at Nereidum Montes, some 380 km northeast of Hooke crater.
The stunning rugged terrain of Nereidum Montes marks the far northern extent of Argyre, one of the largest impact basins on Mars.
Nereidum Montes stretches almost 1150 km and was named by the noted Greek astronomer Eugène Michel Antoniadi (1870).
This is the first study in the world to evaluate the risks posed to transport by weather phenomena on a country-specific and mode-specific basis. Among the EU Member States, Poland has the highest risk level indicator. The highest-risk regions are in the countries of Eastern Europe and in mountainous areas. Low-risk countries include Ireland, Austria, Luxembourg and the Nordic countries.
Hurricane Sandy gave up the ghost on Halloween over Pennsylvania. As the storm weakened to a remnant low pressure area the NASA GOES Project released an animation of NOAA's GOES-13 satellite imagery covering Hurricane Sandy's overhyped life.
The GOES-13 satellite is managed by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and NASA's GOES Project at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. creates images and animations from GOES data.
As Hurricane Sandy made a historic landfall on the New Jersey coast during the night of Oct. 29, the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) on NASA/NOAA's Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership (NPP) satellite captured this night-time view of the storm. This image provided by University of Wisconsin-Madison is a composite of several satellite passes over North America taken 16 to18 hours before Sandy's landfall.
The mineral properties of the aerosol particles and the wavelength distribution of incident light combine to determine whether a dust particle reflects radiation and cools the local atmosphere, absorbs radiation and warms the local atmosphere, or both. While scientists have a good handle on dust's primary effect of reflecting and cooling at the visible wavelengths, the smaller influence of absorbing and warming at the longer infrared wavelengths has remained more of an uncertainty – and most climate models either underestimate it or do not include it at all.
Like a movie star constantly retouching her makeup, the protoplanet Vesta is continually stirring its outermost layer and presenting a young face.
New data from NASA's Dawn mission show that a common form of weathering that affects many airless bodies like Vesta in the inner solar system, including the moon, surprisingly doesn't age the protoplanet's outermost layer.
The data also indicate that carbon-rich asteroids have been splattering dark material on Vesta's surface over a long span of the body's history.
PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — The surface of the giant asteroid Vesta is weathering in a way that appears to be completely different from any other asteroid yet visited, according to new data recorded by NASA's Dawn spacecraft. This new type of space weathering suggests that there's something about Vesta — perhaps its mineral composition or its position in the solar system — that makes its surface environment fundamentally different from other asteroids studied thus far.
The new data are presented in a paper published Nov. 1, 2012, in the journal Nature.
You push a button to call the elevator to your floor and you wait for what seems like forever, thinking it must be broken. When your friend pushes the button, the elevator appears within 10 seconds. "She must have the magic touch," you say to yourself. This episode reflects what philosophers and psychological scientists call "temporal binding": Events that occur close to one another in time and space are sometimes "bound" together and we perceive them as meaningful episodes.
Most people think of galaxies as huge islands of stars, gas and dust that populate the universe in visual splendor. Theory, however, has predicted there are other types of galaxies that are devoid of stars and made predominately of dense gas. These "dark" galaxies would be unseen against the black backdrop of the universe.
Justin Crepp, assistant professor of physics at the University of Notre Dame, provided the high-contrast imaging observations that confirmed the first extrasolar planet discovered in a quadruple star system. He is a coauthor on a paper about the discovery, "Planet Hunters: A Transiting Circumbinary Planet in a Quadruple Star System," recently posted to the open-access arXiv.org, and submitted for publication to the Astrophysical Journal.
This colorful view of the globular star cluster NGC 6362 was captured by the Wide Field Imager attached to the MPG/ESO 2.2-meter telescope at the La Silla Observatory in Chile. This new picture, along with a new image of the central region from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, provide the best view of this little-known cluster ever obtained. Globular clusters are mainly composed of tens of thousands of very ancient stars, but they also contain some stars that look suspiciously young.
The seventeenth tropical depression of the eastern Pacific Ocean hurricane season formed early on October 30 and quickly strengthened into Tropical Storm Rosa. Infrared data from NASA's Aqua satellite revealed strong convection in the storm's center, hinting at that intensification.
Tropical Storm 02B was renamed Tropical Cyclone Nilam when NASA's Aqua satellite captured an infrared image of the storm soaking Sri Lanka on its crawl to a landfall in southern India.
Tropical Storm Son-tinh made landfall in northern Vietnam is and is curving to the northeast to track over southern China. NASA's Aqua satellite revealed powerful thunderstorms around the storm's center before it made landfall and as it filled up the Gulf of Tonkin.
On Monday, Oct. 29, Hurricane Sandy was ravaging the Mid-Atlantic with heavy rains and tropical storm force winds as it closed in for landfall. Earlier, NASA's CloudSat satellite passed over Hurricane Sandy and its radar dissected the storm get a profile or sideways look at the storm. NASA's Aqua satellite provided an infrared view of the cloud tops and NOAA's GOES-13 satellite showed the extent of the storm. The National Hurricane Center reported at 11 a.m. EDT on Oct.