Planets, planets everywhere! The question is—where aren’t we going this week? First we’re going to visit a dwarf planet that resides pretty close to Earth. NASA’s Dawn spacecraft has been orbiting the dwarf planet Ceres since 2015, where it’s been studying surface features like mountains of bright ice and odd impact craters. Moving a little further out, we’re going to linger at Jupiter, where NASA’s Juno spacecraft has delivered some interesting results about the lightning strikes first discovered by the Voyager spacecraft in 1979. It turns out most of Jupiter’s lightning is really similar to the lightning we have here on Earth, but Jupiter’s activity seems to linger towards its poles.
Finally, just one planet over we will visit one of Saturn’s 53 moons: Tethys. This rocky orb is riddled with scars, created by objects colliding with its surface over millennia. These features not only look cool, they can be used by scientists to understand the moon’s history while it was forming in the early days of the solar system.
Still want to zoom around the planets? Check out the full cosmic gallery here.
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Source:WIRED
