Helene Offers a New Mystery

The tiny moon Helene seems to be experiencing some kind of erosion based on new hires images acquired by the Cassini mission in orbit around Saturn. If this is true, this would be quite a mystery considering the moon’s tiny mass and almost total lack of any gravitational ability to shape it’s own surface. Surely this must be coming from external forces such as ring particles being dumped on the surface in one area and then slowly being shaken downslope by small impacts over a very long time. Maybe?

Another color composite by Gordan Ugarkovic.

And a bonus Helene crescent image with posterization effects removed by Wanderingspace.

The Cassini Mission in Stark B&W

CASSINI MISSION from Chris Abbas on Vimeo.

Gorgeous idea — taking the raw images from the Cassini mission and making a long flip-book style movie. Leaving in the flaws and noise of raw images happens to add a nice stylistic touch to the overall feeling of the film. The nature of multiple images taken by the spacecraft often with large and small gaps in time coincidentally makes some engaging jumpy into smooth segments.

Above Earth Tshirt Celebrates 50 Years of Manned Spaceflight

In honor of the 50th anniversary of Yuri Gagarin's historic first manned mission into the great beyond... Chop Shop's newest iconic tshirt was released today featuring 23 historic missions of mankind's exploration of Earth and space. Missions starting with Sputnik -- leading to Yuri Gagarin's first manned mission expanding to today's permanently manned International Space Station.

The design itself also includes unmanned missions like Sputnik, Hubble as well as missions inhabited by species other than human. A spiraling timeline weaves the missions together and is numbered with significant years of progress. Pre-Order it for Men on American Apparel’s Black, Navy or on Alstyle Black and for Women on American Apparel Black. Look for a children’s version in a few weeks as well.

Voyager 1 Approach Video by Bjorn Jonsson

Voyager 1 Approach Video by Bjorn Jonsson from Chopping Block on Vimeo.

“This movie is different from similar Voyager movies because I'm keeping Jupiter's size constant. This is accomplished by reprojecting the source images to simple cylindrical projection and then rendering everything using the same viewing geometry. I also sharpened the images a bit to better reveal various details.” — Bjorn Jonsson

The time lapse estimation is about 10 Earth hours per second. Special thanks to unmannedspaceflight.com for all the awesome.

The Great Red Spot

This is a reprocessed image of Jupiter’s Great Red Spot from the 1979 Voyager 1 encounter with the planet. Old data like this is being crunched by people like Bjorn Jonsson to create new and better detailed images that were not possible when the data sets were originally acquired. For comparison, just take a look at the “official” NASA release of the same image data from back in '79. I do need to begrudgingly note that the contrast and sharpness have been artificially exaggerated in this newer image for appearance.

Now That is a Comet

Deep Impact (now known as the Epoxi Mission) passes by comet Hartley 2 and takes the best images of an active comet that I have seen. Too many jets to count on the recently released set of images from closest approach. Apparently there is a huge number of higher resolution images still to come.

The Plumes of Enceladus

Back and front lit plumes This is the best lit image taken of the plumes of Enceladus thus far by Cassini. The moon is lit from the front by Saturnshine and the plumes are being back-lit by the Sun directly behind. A perfect alignment for revealing active geysers on a small moon.

DIY Space Exploration

The video you are watching comes from a camera attached to a weather balloon that rose into the upper stratosphere and recorded Earth against the blackness of space. This is amazing if you consider its a family that just decided to try it. Anyone could have done this before NASA or the Soviets had the ability to video record been as common as it is today. It is also worth noting that this is fairly similar to the way the Air Force did actually obtain the first ever images of Earth from space.