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Image: The moon sets above the snowcovered Alp Salaz above Untervaz in the rhine valley

Science News

Month in space: January 2010

Enjoy a cool view of the moon, planets and other celestial highlights for January 2010.

/ 17 PHOTOS
Image: Trails of debris as ice melts in Mars's spring

'Trees' on Mars

This picture from the high-resolution camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, released Jan. 14, makes it look as if pine trees are growing on the Red Planet. Scientists say the dark streaks are actually trails of debris, created by landslides that occur when carbon dioxide ice melts away from sand dunes near Mars' north pole.

Nasa/jpl/malin Space Science Sys / NASA/JPL/MALIN SPACE SCIENCE SYS
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Whirling stars

This long night exposure photo, taken late Jan. 13, shows the famous north face of Eiger Mountain overlooking the Swiss resort of Grindelwald in the Bernese Alps. Stars spin around the celestial north pole.

Fabrice Coffrini / AFP

Start to finish

This digital composite shows the rare annular solar eclipse as seen from Kerala in South India, and by others glancing skyward around the world on Jan. 15. During an annular eclipse, the moon passes directly in front of the sun, leaving a spectacular ring of fire. Read the full story.

Image: 30 Doradus

Celestial sparkles

Hot, massive stars sparkle like blue diamonds amid the warm, glowing clouds of the 30 Doradus Nebula in this picture from the Hubble Space Telescope. The picture, based on data acquired in October 2009 and released Dec. 15, is the most detailed view of the largest stellar nursery in our local galactic neighborhood.

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Spots on Saturn

Saturn dwarfs the icy moon Rhea in a natural-color view acquired by the Cassini orbiter in November 2009 and released on Dec. 25. The tiny shadow of another moon, Tethys, is visible on the left edge of Saturn's disk, but the moon itself is out of the picture.

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Drill, baby, drill

The drill on the Opportunity rover's robotic arm has left a circular mark on "Marquette Island," a rock that scientists believe came from deep within Mars' crust. A crater-digging impact could have excavated the rock and thrown it a long distance, to the place where Opportunity found it during the rover's long trek across the Martian plain. NASA released this photo Jan. 21.

Image: SPACE-SCIENCE-RESEARCH-VISTA

Cosmic flame

The Flame Nebula glows in a picture taken by the European Southern Observatory's VISTA telescope and released Dec. 11. VISTA, or the Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy, is the latest addition to the ESO's Paranal Observatory in Chile. VISTA's wide-field view also includes the glow of the reflection nebula NGC 2023, just below center, and the ghostly outline of the Horsehead Nebula toward the lower right. The bright bluish star at right is one of the three bright stars forming the Belt of Orion.

Ho / ESO
Image: KAZAKHSTAN-SPACE-SOYUZ-TMA-15-LANDING

Opening the hatch

Russian ground crew members work to open up a Soyuz space capsule after its trip from the International Space Station back to Earth on Dec. 1. Belgian astronaut Frank De Winne, Russian cosmonaut Roman Romanenko and Canadian astronaut Robert Thirsk are inside, waiting to be helped out.

Shamil Zhumatov / POOL
Satellite imagery captured on Wednesday, the day 
after Haiti's earthquake, shows the ruined National Palace surrounded by people 
and debris. Click on the image to explore the scene with HDView (plug-in required)

After the quake

Satellite imagery captured on the day after Haiti's Jan. 12 earthquake shows Port-au-Prince's ruined National Palace surrounded by people and debris. Read more about this

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Year of the Cat

2010 is the Chinese Year of the Tiger, and thus it's apt that one of the year's first pictures from the European Southern Observatory focuses on the Cat's Paw Nebula, a vast region of star formation about 5,500 light-years from Earth. This Jan. 20 image shows clouds of glowing hydrogen in the shape of a 50-light-year-wide feline paw in the constellation Scorpius.

Dunes of sand-sized materials have been trapped on the floors of many Martian craters. This is one example, from a crater in Noachis Terra, west of the giant Hellas impact basin.

The dunes here are linear, thought to be due to shifting wind directions. In places, <images/2009/details/cut/ESP_016036_1370_cut.jpg> each dune is remarkably similar to adjacent dunes, including a reddish (or dust colored) band on northeast-facing slopes. Large angular boulders litter the floor between dunes. 

The most extensive linear dune fields know in the Solar System are on Saturn's large moon Titan. Titan has a very different environment and composition, so at meter-scale resolution they probably are very different from Martian dunes.

Waves of Martian sand

Dunes of sand-sized materials have been trapped on the floors of many Martian craters. This is one example, from a crater in Noachis Terra, west of the giant Hellas impact basin. The color-coded image was captured by the high-resolution camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and released on Jan. 13.

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Out for a spin

A Russian Soyuz spacecraft makes its maneuvers with Earth as a backdrop in a picture taken from the International Space Station on Jan. 21. The Soyuz was repositioned from a port on the Zvezda module to a different port on the station's recently installed Poisk module.

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Shining seas

A photograph taken from the International Space Station on Dec. 3 shows the Calabria region - the southern "toe" of Italy's boot - outlined by the Ionian and Tyrrhenian Seas. The water surfaces present a mirrorlike appearance due to sunglint. This phenomenon is caused by sunlight reflecting off the water toward the astronaut photographer in orbit.

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Great Brrrr-itain

Snow blankets Great Britain in a Jan. 7 picture captured by NASA's Terra satellite. The cities of Manchester, Birmingham and London form ghostly gray shapes against the white land surface. Immediately east of London, clouds swirl over the island, casting blue-gray shadows toward the north.

Jeff Schmaltz
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Tale of a galaxy's tail

Two spectacular tails of hot gas trail behind the galaxy ESO 137-001 in a composite image released Jan. 21. X-ray imagery from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory is shown in blue. Optical-light emissions are shown in yellow, and emissions from hydrogen show up in red. The brighter of the two tails had been seen before, but Chandra's sighting of the second tail came as a surprise to scientists.

Image: The moon sets above the snowcovered Alp Salaz above Untervaz in the rhine valley

Cold moon

The setting moon looms above the snow-covered Alp Salaz in Switzerland's Rhine Valley on Nov. 5.

Arno Balzarini / KEYSTONE
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The final frontier

A panorama from the Hubble Space Telescope, released Jan. 5, provides a full-color view of thousands of galaxies in various stages of assembly. The picture draws upon mosaics taken in 2004 and 2009, and covers part of the southern field of a large galaxy census called the Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey, or GOODS. The faintest and reddest objects in the image are galaxies that formed 600 million years after the big bang.

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