Flying above the plains of Venus with an… inflatable aircraft

Engineers with defense and aerospace contractor Northrop Grumman and Tustin, California-based smart space technology company L’Garde announce the development of a new concept airplane, which could fly in the skies above Venus for up to a year. Such an asset could reveal a multitude of new data about our neighboring world, which features temperatures significantly […]

Picture of the Day: Monster Saturn Storm

Cassini has been circling Saturn for years, but it’s still revealing spectacular things about the planet. Violent weather provides a great spectacle on Earth, as long as it doesn’t actually destroy anything, but it’s nothing compared with what’s happening on Saturn.

Picture of the Day: Double moons

Monster Saturn storm ate its own tail

Since gas giants are made up of, well, gas, it’s easy for giant storms to form around them. Saturn and Jupiter are always peppered with monster storms that ravage the planets. They don’t do any actual damage since there’s nothing there to damage, but they do make for some spectacular shots.

When the Earth was fully covered in ice, the oceans flowed freely

We tend to think of the Earth as it is today, covered by water for the most part, with green continents and two white polar ice caps. It’s easy to think that it has always been like this, even though we know the planet evolved in time.

Here is Saturn’s Mysterious North Pole Hexagon, as seen by Cassini

Astronomers have known for a while that Saturn houses a very peculiar cloud pattern at its north pole, a hexagon. They don’t know why and how it’s formed, but it is one of the most striking features of the spectacular planet.

Picture of the Day: Did you think this is our moon? Well guess again!

Why does one half of Dione have more craters than the other? Start with the fact that Saturn‘s moon Dione always has one side that faces Saturn, and always has one side that faces away. This is similar to Earth’s Moon. This tidal locking means that one side of Dione always leads as the moon […]