Epic Space By Tobias Roetsch.

Jupiter

Pictures of the day - December 16, 2018

Insight A System - 3rd Planet (Insight A-III)

Insight A-III is the third planet orbiting Insight A. It is a hot Ice-giant orbiting it’s sun at an average distance of 0.12 AU. The planet’s atmosphere has a temperature of 960 F and it’s atmosphere lacks any type of define cloud decks. This is a helium ice giant, meaning that it has lost all of it’s hydrogen and the atmosphere is dominated by helium instead. As a result, the planet has a monochromatic color.

Insight A-III has a mass of 13.22 Earths, and a diameter of 4.03 times that of Earth. The planet is tidally locked to it’s sun and orbits the sun once every 14.76 Earth days.

High Resolution Pictures

Insight A-III

Lunar View

Asteroid Moon

Blinding Sun and Inner Planets

Pictures of the day 2 - December 2, 2018

Insight System - Fourth Planet (Insight B-IV)

Insight B-IV is a Saturn-Like planet with an extensive tan-colored ring system. The planet is 53,870 kilometers in radius and has a mass of 62.7 Earth’s. This small gas giant orbits Insight B at an average distance of 0.56 AU and completes and orbit once every 184.9 Earth days. A day on the planet lasts 16 hours and 24 minutes.

Weather on the planet is quite active with numerous storm systems ranging across the planet constantly. The temperatures averages -94 F.

A total of 26 moons orbit Insight B-IV, but only one of those, the third satellite is a large rounded object. Its lone large moon has a radius of 1,132 kilometers, and a mass one quarter that of our moon.

High Resolution Pictures

Insight B-IV

Active atmosphere

Lonely moon

Duality

Insight B-IV-M3 (only large moon)

Lunar Surface

Between the rings

Picture of the day - January 3, 2019

Desert-like moon orbiting a large gas giant. This is the same world as the skylines from the previous post.

Pictures of the day - November 28, 2018

Ringed Earth-sized moon with a thin foggy atmosphere.

High Resolution Pictures

Violet Rings

Closeup

Sky

Thin Atmosphere

Crater fog

Pictures of the Day 2 - December 30, 2018

Here we come across an Earth-like world with violet hued skies. This planet supports marine life and orbits a star within a globular cluster. There are 137 star systems just within 5 light years of this planet, and the planet’s sky is lit up with their light. Most of the stars are close enough to be visible during the day. Additionally, this planet is located within a quandary star system consisting of an K type orange dwarf orbited three smaller red dwarfs in a wide complex orbit.

While Earth-Like, there are notable differences from Earth. First, the planet has almost no obliquity meaning it has no axial tilt and therefore does not experience seasons. Massive ice caps cover both poles. The planet also spins very slowly with a solar day lasting almost 3.86 Earth days. Only 4 small asteroid moons orbit the planet. Additionally, life is limited to the oceans, and the atmosphere is almost entirely made up of carbon dioxide.

Space Engine System ID: RSC 5581-4-4-2706-51 A4 to visit the system in Space Engine.

Planet Stats Below:

Radius: 5,268.61 km (0.83 x Earth) Mass: 0.59 Earth Masses Orbital Distance: 0.43 AU Length of Year: 118.88 Days Length of Solar Day: 3.86 Days Gravity: 0.86 g Average Temperature: 277 K (39° F) Atmospheric Pressure: 0.52 Atmospheres Atmospheric Composition: 92.7% Carbon Dioxide, 4.23% Nitrogen, 3.02% Oxygen, 0.05% Sulfur Dioxide.

MESSENGER Spacecraft 

MESSENGER (whose backronym is Mercury Surface, Space Environment, Geochemistry, and Ranging, and which is a reference to the Roman mythological messenger, Mercury) was a NASA robotic spacecraft that orbited the planet Mercury between 2011 and 2015. The spacecraft was launched aboard a Delta II rocket in August 2004 to study Mercury’s chemical composition, geology, and magnetic field.

The instruments carried by MESSENGER were used on a complex series of flybys – the spacecraft flew by Earth once, Venus twice, and Mercury itself three times, allowing it to decelerate relative to Mercury using minimal fuel. During its first flyby of Mercury in January 2008, MESSENGER became the second mission after Mariner 10’s 1975 flyby to reach Mercury.

MESSENGER entered orbit around Mercury on March 18, 2011, becoming the first spacecraft to do so. It successfully completed its primary mission in 2012. Following two mission extensions, the MESSENGER spacecraft used the last of its maneuvering propellant and deorbited as planned, impacting the surface of Mercury on April 30, 2015

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Image Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington

Pictures of the day 2 - December 4, 2018

Insight B System - Sixth Planet (Insight B-VI)

Insight B-VI is the outer-most planet orbiting Insight B. The planet is a Jupiter-Sized gas giant with a mass of 1.42 Jupiter Masses, and a radius of 74,962 kilometers. A thick carbon-rich ring system surround the planet.

Insight B-VI orbits its sun at an average distance of 1.74 AU, completing an orbit once every 2.79 Earth Years. A day on the planet lasts only 8 hours and 7 minutes. It is a frigid giant, the atmosphere of which averages -258 F. Monstrous storms rage in the planet’s atmosphere, powered by internally released heat.

The planet is the only world in the system to by surrounded by a major lunar system. Three massive moons larger than Mars orbit the planet, along with 3 smaller rounded satellites, and 74 asteroid-like moons.

High Resolution Pictures

Insight B-VI

South Pole

Giant Storm

Inner-most Major Moon.

Approaching Eclipse

Mars Express finds evidence of liquid water under Martian pole

A ground-penetrating radar aboard the European Space Agency’s Mars Express satellite has found evidence for a pool of liquid water, a potentially habitable environment, buried under layers of ice and dust at the red planet’s south pole.

“This subsurface anomaly on Mars has radar properties matching water or water-rich sediments,” said Roberto Orosei, principal investigator of the Mars Advanced Radar for Subsurface and Ionosphere Sounding instrument, or MARSIS, lead author of a paper in the journal Science describing the discovery.

The conclusion is based on observations of a relatively small area of Mars, but “it is an exciting prospect to think there could be more of these underground pockets of water elsewhere, yet to be discovered,” added Orosei.

Scientists have long theorised the presence of subsurface pools under the martian poles where the melting point of water could be decreased due to the weight of overlying layers of ice. The presence of salts in the Martian soil also would act to reduce the melting point and, perhaps, keep water liquid even at sub-freezing temperatures.

Earlier observations by MARSIS were inconclusive, but researchers developed new techniques to improve resolution and accuracy.

“We’d seen hints of interesting subsurface features for years but we couldn’t reproduce the result from orbit to orbit, because the sampling rates and resolution of our data was previously too low,” said Andrea Cicchetti, MARSIS operations manager.

“We had to come up with a new operating mode to bypass some onboard processing and trigger a higher sampling rate and thus improve the resolution of the footprint of our dataset. Now we see things that simply were not possible before.”

MARSIS works by firing penetrating radar beams at the surface of Mars and then measuring the strength of the signals as they are reflected back to the spacecraft.

The data indicating water came from a 200-kilometre-wide (124-mile-wide) area that shows the south polar region features multiple layers of ice and dust down to a depth of about 1.5 kilometres (0.9 miles). A particularly bright reflection below the layered deposits can be seen in a zone measuring about 20 kilometres (12 miles) across.

Orosei’s team interprets the bright reflection as the interface between overlying ice and a pool or pond of liquid water. The pool must be at least several centimetres thick for the MARSIS instrument to detect it.

“The long duration of Mars Express, and the exhausting effort made by the radar team to overcome many analytical challenges, enabled this much-awaited result, demonstrating that the mission and its payload still have a great science potential,” says Dmitri Titov, ESA’s Mars Express project scientist.

The discovery is significant because it raises the possibility, at least, of potentially habitable sub-surface environments.

“Some forms of microbial life are known to thrive in Earth’s subglacial environments, but could underground pockets of salty, sediment-rich liquid water on Mars also provide a suitable habitat, either now or in the past?” ESA asked in a statement. “Whether life has ever existed on Mars remains an open question.”

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