Blue Titan

Pictures of the Day December 1, 2018

Insight System - Insight B-II

The second planet orbiting Insight B. This world is a more extreme version of Venus that is choked in a thick carbon dioxide atmosphere 427 times thicker than Earths. Unlike Venus, the atmosphere is humid, water vapor comprises 6.45% of the planet’s atmosphere, further amplifying the greenhouse effect of the atmosphere.

Insight B-II is a super earth with approximately 5.28 Earth’s masses, and a radius of 1.39 Earth Radii. The planet is quite dense and has a surface gravity of 2.7 g. Such a high surface gravity flattens the ground and results in only small elevation changes across the entire surface of the planet. The planet is tidally locked to the sun and orbiting at a distance of 0.09 AU. Surface temperatures average 1,182 F. Most of the surface consists of broad plains covered in shallow sand dunes.

High Resolution Pictures

Insight B-II

Approaching the atmosphere

Storms

Daytime sky

Twilight sky

Pictures of the Day - November 10, 2018

Three different desert worlds orbiting a bright red dwarf with surface shots. The star is roughly 10% the brightness of the sun, about as bright as you can get for a red dwarf. A common misconception is that red dwarfs are actually red in color. This is true only for the smaller dim ones, but most have a more orange to red-orange tint to them.

Unfortunately, I already left the system long before I could log the system ID.

High Resolution Pics

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End of the Day

Picture of the Day - October 18, 2018.

Sunset on an alien moon.

Some truly unique universes by Chromattix on DeviantArt! 😍

O’Srius System - Post 3 (Stunning World)

Here we come across the smaller component of a double planetary system, being the 9 and 10th planets from the star. This planet is by far the most visually stunning world I have come across in the 6 months of playing space engine.

The world is roughly the same size as Earth, but only 0.58 times the mass. The surface is covered in liquid nitrogen oceans and nitrogen ice-caps. The planet has a surface temperature of 68 K or -337 °F. The atmosphere is composed of nitrogen and argon with a surface pressure of 0.095 atmospheres. The surface has a nitrogen cycle, much the same as Earth has a water cycle.

High Resolution Pics

Picture 1 - Crescent

Picture 2 - Gibbous

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Picture 4 - River Channels

Picture 5 - Varied terrain

Picture 6 - Polar Cap

Picture 7 - Nitrogen Shoreline

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.”

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Starlight

Pictures of the day 2 - November 24, 2019

I have to admit, this planet is probably to closest reminder to me of Christmas. This purple-colored Earth with violet seas and a deep purple atmosphere is quite unique. Whats even more fascinating about the planet is its brilliant green sunsets and sunrises.

Space Engine System ID: RS 5581-42-1-2-487 6 (Unedited)

High Resolution Pics

Purple Earth

Lone Moon

Kind of Christmassy

Weird Atmosphere

Green Sunset

Ten Interesting facts about Mercury

Mercury is the closest planet to the sun. As such, it circles the sun faster than all the other planets, which is why Romans named it after their swift-footed messenger god. He is the god of financial gain, commerce, eloquence, messages, communication (including divination), travelers, boundaries, luck, trickery and thieves; he also serves as the guide of souls to the underworld

Like Venus, Mercury orbits the Sun within Earth’s orbit as an inferior planet, and never exceeds 28° away from the Sun. When viewed from Earth, this proximity to the Sun means the planet can only be seen near the western or eastern horizon during the early evening or early morning. At this time it may appear as a bright star-like object, but is often far more difficult to observe than Venus. The planet telescopically displays the complete range of phases, similar to Venus and the Moon, as it moves in its inner orbit relative to Earth, which reoccurs over the so-called synodic period approximately every 116 days.

Mercury’s axis has the smallest tilt of any of the Solar System’s planets (about ​1⁄30 degree). Its orbital eccentricity is the largest of all known planets in the Solar System; at perihelion, Mercury’s distance from the Sun is only about two-thirds (or 66%) of its distance at aphelion.

Its orbital period around the Sun of 87.97 days is the shortest of all the planets in the Solar System.  A sidereal day (the period of rotation) lasts about 58.7 Earth days.

Mercury’s surface appears heavily cratered and is similar in appearance to the Moon’s, indicating that it has been geologically inactive for billions of years. Having almost no atmosphere to retain heat, it has surface temperatures that vary diurnally more than on any other planet in the Solar System, ranging from 100 K (−173 °C; −280 °F) at night to 700 K (427 °C; 800 °F) during the day across the equatorial regions. The polar regions are constantly below 180 K (−93 °C; −136 °F). The planet has no known natural satellites. 

Unlike many other planets which “self-heal” through natural geological processes, the surface of Mercury is covered in craters. These are caused by numerous encounters with asteroids and comets. Most Mercurian craters are named after famous writers and artists. Any crater larger than 250 kilometres in diameter is referred to as a Basin.

The largest known crater is Caloris Basin, with a diameter of 1,550 km. The impact that created the Caloris Basin was so powerful that it caused lava eruptions and left a concentric ring over 2 km tall surrounding the impact crater.

Two spacecraft have visited Mercury: Mariner 10 flew by in 1974 and 1975; and MESSENGER, launched in 2004, orbited Mercury over 4,000 times in four years before exhausting its fuel and crashing into the planet’s surface on April 30, 2015.

It is the smallest planet in the Solar System, with an equatorial radius of 2,439.7 kilometres (1,516.0 mi). Mercury is also smaller—albeit more massive—than the largestnatural satellites in the Solar System, Ganymede and Titan.  

As if Mercury isn’t small enough, it not only shrank in its past but is continuing to shrink today. The tiny planet is made up of a single continental plate over a cooling iron core. As the core cools, it solidifies, reducing the planet’s volume and causing it to shrink. The process crumpled the surface, creating lobe-shaped scarps or cliffs, some hundreds of miles long and soaring up to a mile high, as well as Mercury’s “Great Valley,” which at about 620 miles long, 250 miles wide and 2 miles deep (1,000 by 400 by 3.2 km) is larger than Arizona’s famous Grand Canyon and deeper than the Great Rift Valley in East Africa. 

The first telescopic observations of Mercury were made by Galileo in the early 17th century. Although he observed phases when he looked at Venus, his telescope was not powerful enough to see the phases of Mercury.

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images: Joseph Brimacombe, NASA/JPL, Wikimedia Commons

Jupiter