The Solar System
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Comet Hyakutake:
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Comet LINEAR: The comet broke apart in the summer of 2000 and left pieces as small as smoke-sized particles and as large as football-field-sized fragments. Trackers found tiny particles that made up the 62,000-mile-long dust tail and 16 large fragments, some as wide as 330 feet. The comet was then 64 million miles from Earth.
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Comet NEAT: Close Up of Comet NEAT From Kitt Observatory. The image was captured with the Mosaic I camera, which has a one-square degree field of view, or about five times the size of the Moon. Even with this large field, only the comet's coma and the inner portion of its tail are visible. More…
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Ganymede, as photographed by Galileo: Ganymede [GAN-ee-meed] is the largest moon of Jupiter and is the largest in our solar system with a diameter of 3,280 miles. If Ganymede orbited the Sun instead of Jupiter it could be classified as a planet. Like Callisto, Ganymede is most likely composed of a rocky core with a water/ice mantle and a crust of rock and ice.
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Jupiter:
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Jupiter:
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Jupiter Aurora:
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Jupiter Aurora:
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Jupiter Damage: Most prominent damage was caused by Shoemaker-Levy comets that struck the surface as the world watched.
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Jupiter, Io: Close up.
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Jupiter Io: As seen from space floating above the giant planet.
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Mars:
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Mars:
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Mars:
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Mars:
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Mars, closest view:
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Mars Crater:
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Mars Flaky Rock:
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Mars Globe:
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Mars Newton:
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Mars Noachis Gullies:
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Neptune:
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Neptune:
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Quaoar, 2002 LM60: This is an artist's impression of the icy Kuiper belt object 2002 LM60, dubbed "Quaoar" by its discoverers. Quaoar (pronounced kwa-whar) is about 800 miles in diameter and is about half the size of Pluto. Like Pluto, Quaoar dwells in the Kuiper belt, an icy debris field of comet-like bodies extending 7 billion miles beyond Neptune's orbit. — More…
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Saturn, a change of seasons: Saturn puts on a show as the planet and its magnificent ring system nod majestically over the course of its 29-year journey around the Sun. These Hubble images, captured from 1996 to 2000, show Saturn's rings open up from just past edge-on to nearly fully open as it moves from autumn towards winter in its Northern Hemisphere.
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Saturn Tilt: Saturn's equator is tilted relative to its orbit by 27 degrees, very similar to the 23-degree tilt of the Earth. As Saturn moves along its orbit, first one hemisphere, then the other is tilted towards the Sun. This cyclical change causes seasons on Saturn, just as the changing orientation of Earth's tilt causes seasons on our planet.
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Saturn's Rings: Astronomers are studying images to investigate the detailed variations in the color and brightness of the rings. They hope to learn more about the rings' composition, how they were formed, and how long they might last. Saturn's rings are incredibly thin, with a thickness of only about 30 feet. The rings are made of dusty water ice, in the form of boulder-sized and smaller chunks that gently collide with each other as they orbit around Saturn.
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Saturn is Big: Saturn is about 75,000 miles across, and is flattened at the poles because of its very rapid rotation. A day is only 10 hours long. Strong winds account for the horizontal bands in the atmosphere of this giant gas planet. The delicate color variations in the clouds are due to smog in the upper atmosphere, produced when ultraviolet radiation from the Sun shines on methane gas.
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Saturn's weather is violent as can be seen from this view, just above the ring. The Cassini/Huygens spacecraft, launched from Earth in 1997, arrived in July, 2004, and was successfully inserted into orbit. It is scheduled to land a probe on Titan, Saturn's largest moon, and to orbit the planet for four years for a detailed study of the entire Saturn system.
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Sun, 3-color:
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Titan:
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Uranus:
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The Solar System
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