Many Moons

MANY MOONS FROM AROUND OUR SOLAR SYSTEM

The Hubble Space Telescope images below, taken by the Advanced Camera for Surveys, reveal Pluto, its large moon Charon, and the planet's two new candidate satellites. Between May 15 and May 18, 2005, Charon, and the potential moons, provisionally designated P1 and P2, all appear to rotate counterclockwise around Pluto.

P1 and P2 move less than Charon because they are farther from Pluto, and therefore would be orbiting at slower speeds. P1 and P2 are thousands of times less bright than Pluto and Charon. The enhanced-color images of Pluto (the brightest object) and Charon (to the right of Pluto) were constructed by combining short exposure images. The images of the new satellites were made from longer exposures. Click image for full resolution.

Credit: NASA, ESA, H. Weaver (JHU/APL), A. Stern (SwRI), and the Hubble Space Telescope Pluto Companion Search Team
spiked pics
In the short-exposure image (first image), taken June 11, 2002, the candidate moons cannot be seen. They do, however, appear in the second set of images. Longer exposure times were used to take these images. Pluto and Charon are overexposed in these images, causing the bright streaks or "blooms" that emerge vertically from them.

The candidate moons are not overexposed because they are thousands of times less bright than Pluto and Charon. In these unprocessed images, various optical artifacts of the Advanced Camera for Surveys system are visible, such as the radial spokes of light caused by the telescope's optics.

Credit: NASA, ESA, H. Weaver (JHU/APL), A. Stern (SwRI), and the Hubble Space Telescope Pluto Companion Search Team

Sample Photo 1

Above: The artist's concept above shows the Pluto system from the surface of one of the candidate moons. The other members of the Pluto system are just above the moon's surface. Pluto is the large disk at center, right. Charon, the system's only confirmed moon, is the smaller disk to the right of Pluto. The other candidate moon is the bright dot on Pluto's far left.

Below: Sedna Compaired to Others

Above: Moons of the Solar System scaled to Earth's Moon

Below: Cassini finds a new moon around Saturn: S/2007-S4 "We detected the 60th moon orbiting Saturn using the Cassini spacecraft's powerful wide-angle camera," said Carl Murray, a Cassini imaging team scientist from Queen Mary, University of London. "I was looking at images of the region near the Saturnian moons Methone and Pallene and something caught my eye." The newly discovered moon first appeared as a very faint dot in a series of images Cassini took of the Saturnian ring system on May 30 of this year. After the initial detection, Murray and fellow Cassini imaging scientists played interplanetary detective, searching for clues of the new moon in the voluminous library of Cassini images to date. The Cassini imaging team's legwork paid off. They were able to locate numerous additional detections, spanning from June 2004 to June 2007. "With these new data sets we were able to establish a good orbit for the new moon,” said Murray. "Knowing where the moons are at all times is important to the Cassini mission for several reasons."

Above: Miranda Voyager 2 January 24 1986

Below: Galileo's Image of our Moon December 7, 1992 One of the best natural color images I have seen!

Above: Liquid Methane Lakes abound on Saturn's Moon Titan. January 29,2009 Recent images of Titan from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft affirm the presence of lakes of liquid hydrocarbons by capturing changes in the lakes brought on by rainfall.For several years, Cassini scientists have suspected that dark areas near the north and south poles of Saturn’s largest satellite might be liquid-filled lakes. An analysis published today in the journal Geophysical Research Letters of recent pictures of Titan's south polar region reveals new lake features not seen in images of the same region taken a year earlier. The presence of extensive cloud systems covering the area in the intervening year suggests that the new lakes could be the result of a large rainstorm and that some lakes may thus owe their presence, size and distribution across Titan’s surface to the moon’s weather and changing seasons. The high-resolution cameras of Cassini’s Imaging Science Subsystem (ISS) have now surveyed nearly all of Titan’s surface at a global scale. An updated Titan map, being released today by the Cassini Imaging Team, includes the first near-infrared images of the leading hemisphere portion of Titan’s northern "lake district” captured on Aug. 15-16, 2008. (The leading hemisphere of a moon is that which always points in the direction of motion as the moon orbits the planet.) These ISS images complement existing high-resolution data from Cassini’s Visible and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer (VIMS) and RADAR instruments. Such observations have documented greater stores of liquid methane in the northern hemisphere than in the southern hemisphere. And, as the northern hemisphere moves toward summer, Cassini scientists predict large convective cloud systems will form there and precipitation greater than that inferred in the south could further fill the northern lakes with hydrocarbons. Some of the north polar lakes are large. If full, Kraken Mare -- at 400,000 square kilometers -- would be almost five times the size of North America’s Lake Superior. All the north polar dark ‘lake’ areas observed by ISS total more than 510,000 square kilometers -- almost 40 percent larger than Earth’s largest “lake,” the Caspian Sea. However, evaporation from these large surface reservoirs is not great enough to replenish the methane lost from the atmosphere by rainfall and by the formation and eventual deposition on the surface of methane-derived haze particles. “A recent study suggested that there's not enough liquid methane on Titan's surface to resupply the atmosphere over long geologic timescales,” said Dr. Elizabeth Turtle, Cassini imaging team associate at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab in Laurel, Md., and lead author of today’s publication. “Our new map provides more coverage of Titan's poles, but even if all of the features we see there were filled with liquid methane, there's still not enough to sustain the atmosphere for more than 10 million years.” Combined with previous analyses, the new observations suggest that underground methane reservoirs must exist.

Below: False Color Images and map of our Moon.

Below: Original Caption Released with Image: (see below) Cassini captures the first high-resolution glimpse of the bright trailing hemisphere of Saturn's moon Iapetus. The color seen in this view represents an expansion of the wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum visible to human eyes. The intense reddish-brown hue of the dark material is far less pronounced in true color images. The use of enhanced color makes the reddish character of the dark material more visible than it would be to the naked eye. This mosaic consists of 60 images covering 15 footprints across the surface of Iapetus. The view is an orthographic projection centered on 10.8 degrees south latitude, 246.5 degrees west longitude and has a resolution of 426 meters (0.26 miles) per pixel. An orthographic view is most like the view seen by a distant observer looking through a telescope. At each footprint, a full resolution clear filter image was combined with half-resolution images taken with infrared, green and ultraviolet spectral filters (centered at 752, 568 and 338 nanometers, respectively) to create this full-resolution false color mosaic. The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging operations center is based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo. For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/home/index.cfm. The Cassini imaging team homepage is at http://ciclops.org. Image Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute Image Addition Date: 2007-10-09

Many Moons

MANY MOONS FROM AROUND OUR SOLAR SYSTEM

Sample Photo 1

Below: Sedna Compaired to Others

Above: Moons of the Solar System scaled to Earth's Moon

Above: Miranda Voyager 2 January 24 1986

Below: Galileo's Image of our Moon December 7, 1992 One of the best natural color images I have seen!

Below: False Color Images and map of our Moon.

Note: The use of False Color Images lets Scientist see Different Minerals on the Surface.

Below: Earth's Moon "Clavius Crater

Below: Jupitor and one of it's many Moons Ganymede April 09, 2007

Below: Hello Earth!

Below: Apollo Landing Sites

Below: Earth's Moon Geo Image