Spaced Out

Planet Mercury has some reminders for us.

1. Keep things simple. Mercury doesn't have an atmosphere or any moons!

2. Celebrate often! The planet completes one revolution around the Sun in just 88 Earth days. If you lived on Mercury, you’d celebrate a birthday every three Earth months!

3. Be grateful for the small things. Because Mercury has a slow spin and short year, it takes a long time for the Sun to rise and set there. Mercury only has one sunrise every 180 Earth days!

Learn more about planet Mercury: https://go.nasa.gov/3UBIeE5

The future of deep space exploration is within view.

Share your excitement for the upcoming II mission around the Moon with downloadable posters: https://go.nasa.gov/3UO4Gdz

On Feb. 14th, 1990, NASAs Voyager 1 space probe while nearing her journey and preparing to leave our solar system,turned to capture an image of home. Revealing Earth as nothing more than a pixel, one small single speck of light in a beam of sun at a distance of roughly 4 billion miles!Astronomer Carl Sagan was part of the Voyager imagining team and proposed having the space craft take such a image. Later in Sagans book titled “Pale Blue Dot:A Vision of the Human Future in Space” he shares his reasoning and why he wished to capture such an image. He shares that he wanted to continue in the tradition of famous earth rising photos captured during the Apollo program, specifically Apollo 17. He then continues,” It seemed to me that another picture of the Earth, this one taken from a hundred times further away, might help in the continuing process of revealing to ourselves our true circumstances and condition. It had been well understood by the scientists and philosophers of classical antiquity that the Earth was a mere point in a vast encompassing Cosmos, but no one had ever seen it as such. Here was our first chance.”
They took the chance and generated an image that when combined with the words of Sagan amazed the entire planet and sparked imagination and wonder into the minds of an entire generation.

Once you understand that, your perspective changes.

This week scientists announced that tiny bits of Saturn’s rings are falling into the massive planet, causing its upper atmosphere to heat up. This unexpected interaction between Saturn and its rings could potentially provide a tool for predicting if planets around other stars have Saturn-like ring systems, too. The discovery was made using 40 years of data from several NASA missions, including Cassini and . Details: go.nasa.gov/3ZtFlWV

The rings are made mostly of particles of water ice that range in size from smaller than a grain of sand to as large as mountains.

This 2013 image from the Cassini spacecraft shows Saturn and its rings backlit by the Sun. Bonus: the "star" near the center is Earth.

More at solarsystem.nasa.gov/saturn