#spacedistant

Closest look ever at #Saturn’s atmosphere and giant hurricane from #NASA's #Cassini Mission. #GrandFinale #spacedistant

The Netherlands turn orange today as King Willem-Alexander celebrates his 50th birthday. This is a false-colour image of the #Netherlands as seen in infrared by #ESA’s Proba-V minisatellite, with vegetation shown in red, woodland in red–brown and built-up areas as green.  The 100m-resolution image extends down to Belgium’s port of Antwerp and capital city of Brussels in the south, with Amsterdam, The Hague and Rotterdam arranged like a triangle on the west coast. The Hoge Veluwe National Park stands out to the south-east of Lake Ijssel.  #spacedistant

#ESA is developing a new family of missions called Sentinels specifically for the operational needs of the Copernicus programme.  The #Sentinel missions mark a new era in #Earth observation focusing on delivering a wealth of operational data for decades to come.  The six different missions carry a range of state-of-the-art technologies to supply a stream of complementary imagery and data tailored to the needs of #Europe’s environmental monitoring Copernicus programme.  For more info go to: http://bit.ly/esa-sentinels #spacedistant

#pictureoftheday Lyrids in Southern Skies. Earth's annual #Lyrid #meteor shower peaked before dawn on April 22nd, as our fair planet plowed through dust from the tail of long-period comet Thatcher. Seen from the high, dark, and dry Atacama desert a waning crescent Moon  and brilliant #Venus join Lyrid meteor streaks in this composited view. Captured over 5 hours on the night of April 21/22, the meteors stream away from the shower's radiant, a point not very far on the sky from Vega, alpha #star of the #constellation Lyra. The radiant effect is due to perspective as the parallel meteor tracks appear to converge in the distance. In the foreground are domes of the Las Campanas Observatory housing (left to right) the 2.5 meter du Pont Telescope and the 1.3 meter Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment (OGLE) #telescope . Image Credit : Yuri Beletsky ( Carnegie Las Campanas Observatory,TWAN ) #spacedistant

Beauty of #Earth Credit : Thomas Pesquet #spacedistant

This Week in #NASA History: Hubble Space Telescope Deployed -- April 25, 1990. This week in 1990, the #Hubble #Space #Telescope was deployed from the cargo bay of space shuttle Discovery as part of STS-31. NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center was responsible for the design, development, and construction of the Hubble Space Telescope and has played a significant role in the testing of Hubble's successor, the James Webb Space Telescope. Scheduled to launch in October 2018, the Webb telescope will observe the most distant objects in the universe, provide images of the first #galaxies formed and see unexplored #planets around distant stars. The NASA History Program is responsible for generating, disseminating, and preserving NASA’s remarkable history and providing a comprehensive understanding of the institutional, cultural, social, political, economic, technological, and scientific aspects of NASA’s activities in #aeronautics and space.  #spacedistant

#NASA's #Dawn #spacecraft is preparing to observe Ceres on April 29 from an "opposition" position, directly between the dwarf planet’s mysterious Occator Crater and the #sun . This unique geometry may yield new insights about the bright material in the center of the #crate . While preparing for this observation, one of Dawn's two remaining reaction wheels stopped functioning on April 23. By electrically changing the speed at which these gyroscope-like devices spin, Dawn controls its orientation in the zero-gravity, frictionless conditions of space. The team discovered the situation during a scheduled communications session on April 24, diagnosed the problem, and returned the spacecraft to its standard flight configuration, still with hydrazine control, on April 25. The failure occurred after Dawn completed its five-hour segment of ion thrusting on April 22 to adjust its orbit, but before the shorter maneuver scheduled for April 23-24. The orbit will still allow Dawn to perform its opposition measurements. The reaction wheel's malfunctioning will not significantly impact the rest of the extended mission at Ceres. Dawn completed its prime mission in June 2016, and is now in an extended mission. It has been studying Ceres for more than two years, and before that, the spacecraft orbited giant asteroid Vesta, sending back valuable data and images. Dawn launched in 2007. The Dawn operations team has been well prepared to deal with the loss of the reaction wheel. The spacecraft is outfitted with four reaction wheels. It experienced failures of one of the wheels in 2010, a year before it entered orbit around Vesta, and another in 2012, as it was completing its exploration of that fascinating world. When a third reaction wheel stopped working this week, the spacecraft correctly responded by entering one of its safe modes and assigning control of its orientation to its hydrazine thrusters. Today, Dawn's elliptical orbit will bring it from an altitude of 17,300 miles (27,900 kilometers) to 15,800 miles (25,400 kilometers) above #Ceres. More information about Dawn is available at the following sites: https://www.nasa.gov/dawn https://dawn.jpl.nasa.gov #spacedistant

#Mars bears the scars of five giant impacts, including the ancient giant Borealis basin (top of globe), Hellas (bottom right), and Argyre (bottom left). A #NASA - funded team at SwRI discovered that Mars experienced a 400-million-year lull in impacts between the formation of Borealis and the younger basins. Credits: University of #Arizona /LPL/Southwest #Research Institute #spacedistant