Photographer Mikko Lagerstedt specializes in Nordic landscapes, like the windswept snow seen here. I love the way he’s captured the snow that gets picked up and blown by the wind. Keep reading
Tag: planetary science
Founts of Enceladus
In its exploration of Saturn, Cassini discovered that the moon Enceladus is home to icy eruptions. Beneath its shell of ice, Enceladus has a global ocean of salty liquid water. Keep reading
Rippling Airglow
Though we rarely notice it, our sky is always aglow. Washed in solar radiation, the oxygen and nitrogen molecules at high altitude get broken apart during the daytime and recombine Keep reading
Listen to a Martian Dust Devil
A lucky encounter led the Perseverance rover to record the first-ever sound of a dust devil on Mars. The rover happened to have its microphone on (something that only happens Keep reading
Snowing in the Core
Some rocky planetary bodies, like Jupiter‘s moon Ganymede, generate magnetic fields through snow-like, solid precipitation that falls in their liquid metal cores. To study this peculiar and complex arrangement, researchers Keep reading
Stabilizing Jupiter’s Polar Storms
Four years ago, Juno discovered an octagon of eight cyclones at Jupiter’s northern pole and a similar five cyclone structure at its southern pole. Since then, both polygons have remained Keep reading
Martian Glaciers
On Earth, glaciers slide on lubricating layers of water, leaving complex landscapes like fjords and drumlins in their wake. Mars — though once home to enormous ice masses — lacks Keep reading
Jupiter’s Frosted Clouds
New 3D renderings of Jovian clouds show textured swirls akin to a cupcake’s sculpted frosting. The images are based on flyby data from the JunoCam instrument. Because illumination of the Keep reading
Predicting Alien Ice
Europa is an ocean world trapped beneath an ice shell tens of kilometers thick. To better understand what we might find in those oceans, researchers turn to analogs here on Keep reading
Neptune’s Seasonal Changes
Ice giant Neptune orbits our sun once every 165 years, meaning that each season on the planet lasts about 41 years here on Earth. Currently, the side of Neptune facing Keep reading