The explosion was caused by a meteorite, 0.3 to 0.4 meters wide, weighing in at about 40 kilograms. When it hit the moon, it was travelling at 56,000 miles per hour. According to NASA, it exploded with the force of 5 tons of TNT.

“On March 17, 2013, an object about the size of a small boulder hit the lunar surface in Mare Imbrium,” says Bill Cooke of NASA’s Meteoroid Environment Office. “It exploded in a flash nearly 10 times as bright as anything we’ve ever seen before.”

The impact was so bright, in fact, that anyone looking would have seen it without the help of a telescope.

“It jumped right out at me, it was so bright,” says Marshall Space Flight Center analyst Ron Suggs, who was the first to see the impact.

This type of lunar strike is common, but NASA has yet to see one this large in the nearly 8 years its been monitoring the moon for such impacts. Here’s why:

Unlike Earth, which has an atmosphere to protect it, the Moon is airless and exposed. “Lunar meteors” crash into the ground with fair frequency. Since the monitoring program began in 2005, NASA’s lunar impact team has detected more than 300 strikes, most orders of magnitude fainter than the March 17th event. Statistically speaking, more than half of all lunar meteors come from known meteoroid streams such as the Perseids and Leonids. The rest are sporadic meteors–random bits of comet and asteroid debris of unknown parentage.

Oh, by the way, the “explosion” is special thanks to the lack of oxygen in the Moon’s atmosphere.

“The Moon has no oxygen atmosphere, so how can something explode? Lunar meteors don’t require oxygen or combustion to make themselves visible. They hit the ground with so much kinetic energy that even a pebble can make a crater several feet wide. The flash of light comes not from combustion but rather from the thermal glow of molten rock and hot vapors at the impact site,” says NASA.

[NASA via Wired]

Google says it’s the most comprehensive picture of the planet ever made available to the public.

“The images were collected as part of an ongoing joint mission between the USGS and NASA called Landsat,” explains Rebecca Moore, Engineering Manager, Google Earth Engine & Earth Outreach. “Their satellites have been observing earth from space since the 1970s—with all of the images sent back to Earth and archived on USGS tape drives that look something like this example (courtesy of the USGS).”

“We started working with the USGS in 2009 to make this historic archive of earth imagery available online,” she adds. “Using Google Earth Engine technology, we sifted through 2,068,467 images—a total of 909 terabytes of data—to find the highest-quality pixels (e.g., those without clouds), for every year since 1984 and for every spot on Earth. We then compiled these into enormous planetary images, 1.78 terapixels each, one for each year.”

Finally, Google worked with the CREATE Lab at Carnegie Mellon Uinversity to convert the Earth images into HTML5 animations.

The imagery is constructed from millions of satellite images, and is even zoomable. Here are some examples:

Here’s Google’s Timelapse site. Here’s Time’s.

The images depict a hurricane in Saturn’s north pole region. The eye of the storm is around 2,000 kilometers (1,250 miles) in diameter. The clouds on the hurricane’s outer edge are travelling at 150 meters per second (330 miles per hour).

“We did a double take when we saw this vortex because it looks so much like a hurricane on Earth,” said Andrew Ingersoll, a Cassini imaging team member at the California Institute of Technology. “But there it is at Saturn, on a much larger scale, and it is somehow getting by on the small amounts of water vapor in Saturn’s hydrogen atmosphere.”

NASA has stated that the storm on Saturn is “locked onto” the planet’s north pole. Cassini was unable to image Saturn’s northern hemisphere using visible light until 2009, when the planet’s equinox passed. Researchers hope that studying the hurricane on Saturn can provide data on how hurricanes on Earth develop and sustain themselves.

“Such a stunning and mesmerizing view of the hurricane-like storm at the north pole is only possible because Cassini is on a sportier course, with orbits tilted to loop the spacecraft above and below Saturn’s equatorial plane,” said Scott Edgington, Cassini deputy project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “You cannot see the polar regions very well from an equatorial orbit. Observing the planet from different vantage points reveals more about the cloud layers that cover the entirety of the planet.”

(Image courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech/SSI)

Mission controllers this week found Opportunity in a standby mode. NASA has stated that it appears the rover “sensed something amiss” during a camera check on April 22 and entered standby. Team members have prepared commands for Opportunity to bring it back to full operative status.

“Our current suspicion is that Opportunity rebooted its flight software, possibly while the cameras on the mast were imaging the sun,” said John Callas, Mars Exploration Rover Project Manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “We found the rover in a standby state called automode, in which it maintains power balance and communication schedules, but waits for instructions from the ground. We crafted our solar conjunction plan to be resilient to this kind of rover reset, if it were to occur.”

Opportunity was one of two rovers that landed on Mars in 2004 as part of the Mars Exploration Rover Project. The other rover, Spirit, became stuck in soft soil in 2009, and ceased communications in 2010.

The newest rover on Mars, Curiosity, is reported to be fully operational following the solar conjunction. Researchers are planning on sending it commands starting tomorrow.

(Image courtesy ASA/JPL-Caltech)

This week, NASA revealed that Saturn has now been added to the short list of places in the Solar System where astronomers have been able to observe collisions occurring as they happen (Earth, the moon, and Jupiter are the others).

NASA’s Cassini probe has captured images of meteoroids hitting the debris that makes up Saturn’s rings. Researchers believe that studying the impact rate on Saturn can help them determine more precisely how the planets in the Solar System formed.

“These new results imply the current-day impact rates for small particles at Saturn are about the same as those at Earth – two very different neighborhoods in our solar system – and this is exciting to see,” said Linda Spilker, a Cassini project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). “It took Saturn’s rings acting like a giant meteoroid detector – 100 times the surface area of the Earth – and Cassini’s long-term tour of the Saturn system to address this question.”

Cassini scientists studied data for years to find evidence of the tracks the small meteorites left behind. The research has been published in the latest issue of the journal Science.

“We knew these little impacts were constantly occurring, but we didn’t know how big or how frequent they might be, and we didn’t necessarily expect them to take the form of spectacular shearing clouds,” said Matt Tiscareno, lead author of the paper and a Cassini participating scientist at Cornell University. “The sunlight shining edge-on to the rings at the Saturnian equinox acted like an anti-cloaking device, so these usually invisible features became plain to see.”

(Image courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute/Cornell)

Now, NASA is letting everyone in on the agonizing wait with a new feature incorporated into its Eyes on the Solar System software. Eyes on the Solar System is an interactive, 3-D web app that uses up-to-date NASA mission data to depict the Solar System.

The new module allows users to watch the Voyager 1 probe as it hurtles toward interstellar space. Astronomers believe that Voyager 1 entered a “magnetic highway” at the edge of the Solar System late last year. The ‘Highway” is a region where charged particles can pass both in and out of the heliosphere, the bubble of charged particles that surrounds the sun.

The app will speed up Voyager 1′s journey to one day per second. Navigation data from the project is used to show the probe roll and maneuver through the Solar System.

NASA researchers are tracking the particles coming from inside the heliosphere and outside of it. They believe that a sustained increase in detected outside charged particles indicates the “magnetic highway” Voyager 1 currently occupies. Scientists are waiting for a magnetic field shift before confirming the probe has left the Solar System.

(Image courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech)

As you may have expected, the clever minds on reddit first spotted this image. It was subsequently noticed by the likes of Gizmodo and The Huffington Post. Fierce debate ensued. Is it real? If so, did they mean to do it?

We probably know the answer to the first question. You can find the image on NASA’s website, so it’s not likely photoshopped or anything.

But just because it’s real, that doesn’t make it intentional.

I’d like to hope that whoever was controlling the rover had a few too many beers and decided to substitute the forehead of their passed-out buddy for Mars’ vast, blank canvas.

The European Space Agency (ESA) today announced that the water in the Jovian planet’s upper atmosphere has been linked to the 1994 Shoemaker-Levy 9 impacts. The comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 broke up and collided with Jupiter in July of 1994. The week-long event, which was the first directly-seen extraterrestrial collision in the Solar System, was observed by astronomers around the world.

Though astronomers suspected the Shoemaker-Levy impacts were the source of the water, the ESA’s Herschel space observatory has now been able to map the vertical and horizontal distribution of the water in Jupiter’s atmosphere. The observatory’s infrared imaging was able to discern that there is two to three times more water in Jupiter’s southern hemisphere than in the northern hemisphere. Shoemaker-Levy hit Jupiter’s southern hemisphere, and Herschel has found “most” of the water is concentrated around the impact sites. The findings have been published in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.

“Only Herschel was able to provide the sensitive spectral imaging needed to find the missing link between Jupiter’s water and the 1994 impact of comet Shoemaker-Levy 9,” said Thibault Cavalié, lead author of the paper and an astrophysicist at the Laboratoire d’Astrophysique de Bordeaux. “The asymmetry between the two hemispheres suggests that water was delivered during a single event and rules out icy rings or moons as candidate sources.

“According to our models, as much as 95% of the water in the stratosphere is due to the comet impact.”

(Image courtesy ESA/Herschel/T. Cavalié et al./NASA/ESA/Reta Beebe)

NASA, on the other hand, has been staring straight into the sun for years now. The agency launched the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) in 2010 to capture images of the sun, which it does every 12 seconds in 10 different wavelengths. Scientists are using the SDO to learn more about the sun and to improve predictions for solar flares and coronal mass ejections, which can affect satellites orbiting Earth.

In the three years since its launch, the SDO has observed the sun as it ramps up to “solar maximum,” which is the peak of the star’s 11-year solar activity cycle. To demonstrate this increase in the sun’s activity, NASA this week released a video that puts together many of the images taken by the SDO. The time-lapsed video shows two images of the sun per day for three years. It also has some nice background music (“A Lady’s Errand of Love” by Martin Lass).

In the latest Google Tech Talk, Matt Deans of NASA’s Intelligent Robotics Group, discusses how the U.S. space agency uses a variety of Web tools and Google Earth to create the Exploration Ground Data System, or xGDS. Here’s more:

Did you know that NASA uses Google Earth for mission planning and real-time mission operations? Are you curious about the software NASA is developing to carry out future human and robot missions? Would you like to know how modern Web frameworks can be used for data-driven field science?

The Exploration Ground Data System (xGDS) is a suite of reusable software tools for human and robotic missions. xGDS supports mission planning, ingesting and managing geo-referenced and time-series data, and visualization/analysis. xGDS is highly modular, Web-based and makes extensive use of Apache, Django, the Google Earth plug-in, JQuery, and
MySQL.

In this talk, I will discuss the use cases that xGDS was designed to support and describe how it is implemented. I will show how the Intelligent Robotics Group has used xGDS for exploration missions involving astronauts (Arizona), planetary rovers (Canada and Hawaii), and personal submarines (British Columbia and Florida). And, I’ll briefly talk about how xGDS can be used for other applications, such as crisis and disaster response.