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Fascinating and mysterious as always, the space… All these stars I am seeing every night from my window seem to be closer in the pictures, but still just sparkling, impossible to touch…

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Read the rest of Among the Stars (4 words)

© Alexandra for Weirdomatic, 2007. | Permalink | 8 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: space

 UPDATE: In some of the pictures there are galaxies. More information on galaxies and nebulae.

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Read the rest of Eyes of Space (38 words)

© Alexandra for Weirdomatic, 2007. | Permalink | 10 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: space

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Even the scientists expected them to work only for three months NASA’s Mars Rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, started their fourth year on the red planet. Due to the new improvements, the rovers are now smarter and more prepared to discover all the secrets of the red planet. These are just some of the interesting and strange pictures taken by NASA in the last years on Mars.

Spirit, Mars Rover

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Blueberries on Mars – pearl-shaped rocks, strange beads of hematite on a bed of sand that seemed in the beginning like “blueberries” embedded in a “muffin” of Martian soil.

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Cape Verde – The cliff as well as all features at Victoria Crater on Mars got this name in honor of locations on Earth that Magellan explored in the 1500s.

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Clovis – deepest hole drilled in a Martian (August 2004); Spirit ground 9 millimeters into the relatively unweathered interior and brushed dust away to create a flowerlike arrangement of circles nearby.

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Dazzling Dunes – Endurance Crater; the rover investigated dune crests in false-color, seeing a “blue” tint from the beads of hematite that accumulate on flat surfaces. This false-color image shows that the dune crests have accumulated more dust than the flanks of the dunes and the flat surfaces between them.

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Diverse Terrain – view from Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter; various materials and formations on Mars surface. The bright material is supposed to be rich in clays and date back to a time when Mars had a wetter environment.

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Lava Meets Wind – Volcanoes erupted and wind-driven sands scoured the hardened lava to form this jagged mini-landscape, once a seething mass of molten rock and gas bubbles

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RAT Holes – In this false-color image, two dark spots where Spirit used bristles to brush dust from flat surfaces are reminiscent of eyes above a horizontal layered rock that vaguely resembles a mouth. It is enhanced to emphasize color differences among the rocks, soils and brushed areas.

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Roaring Jets – Jets of Carbon dioxide gas erupting from the south polar ice cap.

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Layers of Deposits – ice-rich deposits near the north pole.

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Scylla – a wind-blown ripple, studied using false color in order to emphasize the presence of basaltic sands and hematite-rich spherules.

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Trench – Taken by Spirit when a stuck wheel dug a trench into white soil buried beneath a dark veneer.

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Sunset – The sun sinks beneath the rim of Gusev Crater on May 19, 2005.

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The Next Mission – The Pheonix Mission, scheduled to launch in August 2007, will land on icy soils near the north polar ice cap and study the history of the water in these soils and any associated rocks as well as monitor the polar climate. As NASA says, the lander will search the icy region of Mars for carbon-bearing compounds, potential building blocks of life.

Information & images credit: NASA/JPL/Texas A&M/Cornell

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The last image,”Mars Landing”, a funny one this time, was received by e-mail from Bruce.

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© Alexandra for Weirdomatic, 2007. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: space