Space Photos This Week: Mars Bull's Eye, Sooty Stars

Waterless Place

Image courtesy ESA

Looking like a closeup of the Gulf oil spill, a newly released radar picture taken by a European satellite shows the surprisingly rocky terrain of the Gobi desert in Mongolia.

Unlike the sandy Sahara, the Gobi—Mongolian for "waterless place"—is made up of a series of small, gravelly basins within a larger basin. Conditions there have been ideal for preserving archaeological and paleontological evidence, including the remains of Stone Age settlements and fossils of dinosaur eggs, according to the European Space Agency.

(See a picture of fossil dinosaur eggs found in India.)

Published July 29, 2010

Cryogenic Mirrors

Photograph courtesy NASA

A NASA engineer stands in front of what may be some of the coolest mirrors headed for space: These six mirror segments for the James Webb Space Telescope were recently tested at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama to see how the structures change shape in extreme temperatures.

The polished beryllium mirrors need to operate at about -379 degrees F (-228 degrees C) to collect and reflect faint infrared light from distant galaxies. But the mirrors have to be kept cool artificially even in the chill of space, since heat from the telescope itself can warm things up and contaminate the data.

The James Webb's 18 mirror segments will each be temperature-tested twice before the telescope launches, which is slated for no later than 2014.

Published July 29, 2010

Bull's Eye on Mars

Image courtesy NASA/JPL/University of Arizona

Did Martian geology carve this concentric impact crater, or did a second space rock make a bull's eye? Taken July 9 by the HiRISE camera aboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, the recently released picture shows an impact crater with a slightly off-center pit in its middle.

Mars experts aren't sure whether the pit formed due to erosion of icy and non-icy layers inside the crater or due to a second—and oddly lucky—impact event.

Published July 29, 2010

Sooty Stars

Image courtesy NASA

Two bright stars light up clouds of "soot" in the outer edge of our Milky Way galaxy, as seen in an infrared picture from the Spitzer Space Telescope released July 28.

The false-color image can help astronomers study our galaxy's fog of compounds called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, which are found on Earth in car exhaust and charcoal grills. In space, such compounds form in the clouds of matter where stars are born.

Spitzer has been collecting pictures of the far reaches of the Milky Way as part of the GLIMPSE360 project, which builds on a previous survey of the galaxy's center.

Published July 29, 2010

Polar Imbalance

Image courtesy Jesse Allen, NASA Earth Observatory

A thin red line shows where the Antarctic ice sheet starts flowing off land and over the ocean—a border called the grounding line—in a section from a new mosaic of satellite data released July 23.

Led by scientists at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, the ice-mapping project includes precise data on elevation, which has revealed that Antarctica is losing ice mass along its coasts faster than snowfall is building up in the continent's interior. The imbalance suggests that Antarctic ice loss is contributing to sea level rise.

Published July 29, 2010