Picture Of The Day - January 8, 2019

Picture of the Day 2 - January 16, 2019

A planet and it's moon burn under the glare of 4 suns.

Space Engine System ID: RS 8550-3584-5-403-110 B1.1

Pictures of the day 2 - December 9, 2018

Insight B System - Moons of the sixth planet

Here we have a few views of the system’s sixth planet viewed from the surfaces of the three inner-most moons.

High Resolution Pictures

View from the inner-most moon

View from the second moon

View from the third moon

Sagittarius Triplet

Pillowfort reopens new user registrations at 10 am est

Pillowfort has finally reopened new user registrations which will begin at 10 am eastern. There is a small $5 fee until the site is no longer in beta. I have permanently switched all my posts over there. I’ll be posting a follow up post with my blog link later today

Mars Express finds evidence of liquid water under Martian pole

A ground-penetrating radar aboard the European Space Agency’s Mars Express satellite has found evidence for a pool of liquid water, a potentially habitable environment, buried under layers of ice and dust at the red planet’s south pole.

“This subsurface anomaly on Mars has radar properties matching water or water-rich sediments,” said Roberto Orosei, principal investigator of the Mars Advanced Radar for Subsurface and Ionosphere Sounding instrument, or MARSIS, lead author of a paper in the journal Science describing the discovery.

The conclusion is based on observations of a relatively small area of Mars, but “it is an exciting prospect to think there could be more of these underground pockets of water elsewhere, yet to be discovered,” added Orosei.

Scientists have long theorised the presence of subsurface pools under the martian poles where the melting point of water could be decreased due to the weight of overlying layers of ice. The presence of salts in the Martian soil also would act to reduce the melting point and, perhaps, keep water liquid even at sub-freezing temperatures.

Earlier observations by MARSIS were inconclusive, but researchers developed new techniques to improve resolution and accuracy.

“We’d seen hints of interesting subsurface features for years but we couldn’t reproduce the result from orbit to orbit, because the sampling rates and resolution of our data was previously too low,” said Andrea Cicchetti, MARSIS operations manager.

“We had to come up with a new operating mode to bypass some onboard processing and trigger a higher sampling rate and thus improve the resolution of the footprint of our dataset. Now we see things that simply were not possible before.”

MARSIS works by firing penetrating radar beams at the surface of Mars and then measuring the strength of the signals as they are reflected back to the spacecraft.

The data indicating water came from a 200-kilometre-wide (124-mile-wide) area that shows the south polar region features multiple layers of ice and dust down to a depth of about 1.5 kilometres (0.9 miles). A particularly bright reflection below the layered deposits can be seen in a zone measuring about 20 kilometres (12 miles) across.

Orosei’s team interprets the bright reflection as the interface between overlying ice and a pool or pond of liquid water. The pool must be at least several centimetres thick for the MARSIS instrument to detect it.

“The long duration of Mars Express, and the exhausting effort made by the radar team to overcome many analytical challenges, enabled this much-awaited result, demonstrating that the mission and its payload still have a great science potential,” says Dmitri Titov, ESA’s Mars Express project scientist.

The discovery is significant because it raises the possibility, at least, of potentially habitable sub-surface environments.

“Some forms of microbial life are known to thrive in Earth’s subglacial environments, but could underground pockets of salty, sediment-rich liquid water on Mars also provide a suitable habitat, either now or in the past?” ESA asked in a statement. “Whether life has ever existed on Mars remains an open question.”

source

Pictures of the Day - December 31, 2018

Here I come a across a massive Super-Jovian gas giant. The planet is close to the boundary line with a brown dwarf and has a mass of more than 11 times that of Jupiter. It orbits a hot B-Type star that is part of a binary system consisting of a B type main sequence star and a blue supergiant. The system is located just outside of a globular cluster.

Monstrous storms rage across the planet’s atmosphere, powered not just from the warmth of two luminous suns, but also from internally released heat. A well-structured ring system surrounds the planet along with 66 natural satellites, 6 of which larger than the planet Mercury, including 1 ocean moon larger than Earth that has its own ring system.

Space Engine System ID: RSC 5581-4-0-0-300 B3 to visit the planet in Space Engine.

Planet Stats:

Radius: 71,573.62 km (11.22 x Earth, 1.02 x Jupiter) Mass: 11.06 Jupiter Masses (3,515 x Earth) Orbital Distance: 11.43 AU Length of Year: 16.33 Years Length of Solar Day: 7 hours 56 mins Gravity: 27.90 g Temperature: 720 K (836°F) Atmosphere Composition:  92.7% Hydrogen, 6.88% Helium, 0.32% Methane, 0.10% Hydrogen Deuteride

Pictures of the Day - December 15, 2018

Insight A System - Second Planet (Insight A-II)

Insight A-II is the second planet orbiting Insight A. It is a Venus-like planet shrouded in a thick carbon dioxide and water vapor atmosphere 716 times thicker than Earth’s. The surface temperature averages 1,980 F, and most of the surface is covered in molten rock.

The planet orbits just 0.07 AU from the sun, completing an orbit once every 6.72 Earth days. Insight A-II is a super-earth with a mass 2.66 times that of Earth and a radius of 1.15 Earths.

High Resolution Pictures

Insight A-II

Comet-like planet

The Atmosphere

The Surface

Alien Planet View

Twin sunrise on a Mercury-like planet.

Really detailed map of federation space from star trek.

Map of the Alpha Quadrant From Star Trek.