Tag: Lowlands

New Pluto Images Show Nitrogen Pits

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Every so often we see a new set of images from Pluto, giving us a chance to rediscover it multiple times.  It’s like we are experiencing the July fly-by over and over again, and each new set of images reveals something new and exciting.  I feel the same sense of excitement and discovery each time I see a new image, realizing that it spent 6 hours as a beam of light crossing the 5 Billion Kilometres of the solar system to connect us to the New Horizons probe, a lonely little piece of human ingenuity flying through the darkness. Here...

Heavy Metal Frost on Venus?

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Venus is the most hellish place I know of in the Solar System, and maybe even the broader Universe.  Even though Venus looks pretty harmless and is named for the Roman goddess of Love, beneath the soft looking clouds lies sulphuric acid rainfall, 450 degree surface temperatures, and crushing pressure 90 times the atmospheric pressure of Earth at sea level. How do we get the surface picture of Venus above? NASA’s Magellan probe in 1994 finished mapping the surface by looking at Radio wavelengths emitted by the planet and using radar to bounce waves off the surface to measure features....