Escape Velocities For Every Planet In The Solar System

We just discovered that Haumea, the strange little egg shaped dwarf planet, has a ring!

Bbbbburn

mother fucking science goddamit 

Sometimes it amazes me that the Juno spacecraft was originally designed without any cameras onboard. The JunoCam instrument has produced stunning imagery of Jupiter thus far and shows no signs of stopping soon. The latest wonder is this false-color, high-contrast animation showing the motion of Jupiter’s clouds swirling and flowing past one another. 

Now, this is not Jupiter as you would see it by eye. This animation is derived from two images taken 8 minutes and 41 seconds apart. In that time, Juno  covered a lot of distance, so the two images had to be mathematically re-projected so that they appeared to be taken from the same location. Then, by comparing relative positions of recognizable features in the two photos and applying some understanding of fluid mechanics, observers could calculate the probable flow between those two states. Although this is a coarse example, it’s the same kind of technique often used in fluid dynamical experiments when measuring how flows change between two images. (Image credit:  NASA/JPL/SwRI/MSSS/G. Eichstädt, source; via EuroPlanet; submitted by Kam-Yung Soh)

It’s time for a musical World Record Wednesday! The “Golden Record,” created by NASA and placed on both Voyager spacecraft in 1977, is the phonographic recording to travel farthest. Currently hurtling through space at a distance of over 12 billion miles from Earth on Voyager I, the album is literally a “world record"—a collection of sounds, songs, and short speeches intended to represent the best of planet Earth and humanity. The tracks were carefully curated by NASA and a committee chaired by Carl Sagan, and include music from Bach, Beethoven, Stravinsky, Chuck Berry, Louis Armstrong, and others. (Fun fact: the producer of the Golden Record,“ Timothy Ferris, is an award-winning science author who wrote the script for the Museum’s Space Show “Dark Universe.”)

The Record also features musical recordings from Senegal, Russia, Japan, and other countries. Carl Sagan, who worked on the project, stated that "the spacecraft will be encountered and the record played only if there are advanced space-faring civilizations in interstellar space. But the launching of this ‘bottle’ into the cosmic 'ocean’ says something very hopeful about life on this planet.”

Listen to the album on the Museum’s first-ever Spotify playlist: https://goo.gl/mogYK6

Image: NASA

Dwarf Planet

Pluto has friends that are dwarf planets. Pluto is not #Alone, so stop acting like Pluto is #Sad about #notbeingaplanet

dear pokemon go players

come to pluto

we have rare ice types and carbon monoxide but also ice

what did these penguins do to the scientists to deserve this

My kind of humor tbh.