🔭 Stickney Crater

Credit: HiRISE, MRO, LPL (U. Arizona), NASA

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🔭 The Saturn System Smörgåsbord

Credit: Tom Williams

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earlier this week that a founding leader of the IceCube Collaboration will be awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics.

with ice molecules. IceCube has now detected many illuminating neutrinos. Pictured in 2010, one of the last of IceCube's detector strings is lowered into the freezing abyss, making IceCube the largest neutrino detector ever created. In recognition of unprecedented discoveries, it was announced

lake. The water in each hole soon refreezes. The detectors attached to the strings are sensitive to blue light emitted in the surrounding clear ice. Such light results from fast-moving secondary particles liberated when high-energy neutrinos emitted by powerful processes out in the universe collide

Scientists are melting holes in the bottom of the world. In fact, almost 100 holes melted near the South Pole are now being used as an astronomical observatory. Astronomers with the IceCube Neutrino Observatory lowered a long string knotted with basketball-sized light detectors into each vertical

🔭 Ice Fishing for Cosmic Neutrinos

Credit: NSF, B. Gudbjartsson, IceCube Collaboration

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with smooth dark lunar maria. A likely explanation is that the farside crust is thicker, making it harder for molten material from the interior to flow to the surface and form dark, smooth maria.

lunar farside. Part of a global mosaic of over 15,000 images acquired between November 2009 and February 2011, the highest resolution version shows features at a scale of 100 meters per pixel. Surprisingly, the rough and battered surface of the farside looks very different from the nearside covered

Tidally locked in synchronous rotation, the Moon always presents its familiar nearside to denizens of planet Earth. From lunar orbit, the Moon's farside can become familiar, though. In fact this sharp picture, a mosaic from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter's wide angle camera, is centered on the

🔭 Lunar Farside

Credit: NASA / GSFC / Arizona State Univ. / Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter

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🔭 A Complete Auroral Oval from SMILE

Credit: ESA, CAS, SMILE, UVI

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grooves along the surface is mysterious but may be related to tidal stresses experienced by close-orbiting Phobos or the crater-forming impact itself.

2008. Even though the surface gravity of asteroid-like Phobos is less than 1/1000th Earth's gravity, streaks suggest loose material slid down inside the crater walls over time. Light bluish regions near the crater's rim could indicate a relatively freshly exposed surface. The origin of the curious

large that the impact that blasted out the crater likely came close to shattering the tiny moon. This enhanced-color image of Stickney and surroundings was recorded by the HiRISE camera onboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter as it passed within some six thousand kilometers of Phobos in March of

Stickney Crater, the largest crater on the martian moon Phobos, is named for Chloe Angeline Stickney Hall, mathematician and wife of astronomer Asaph Hall. Asaph Hall discovered both the Red Planet's moons in 1877. Over 9 kilometers across, Stickney is nearly half the diameter of Phobos itself, so

🔭 Stickney Crater

Credit: HiRISE, MRO, LPL (U. Arizona), NASA

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🔭 M104: The Sombrero Galaxy's Tidal Streams

Credit & Copyright: Engelbert Vollmer

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quickly with a high-speed camera and the clearest images are added up. Which object in this smörgåsbord interests you? Perhaps Titan or the icy stripes of Enceladus? Maybe the gaps and spokes in Saturn’s rings? Saturn's opposition, when Earth passes in between the planet and the Sun, occurred on