Tired of downloading the same tired old daily weather maps? Well, now you can download the daily Martian weather maps and myriad other delights. Although we stopped traveling to the moon more than two decades ago, NASA's continued to send out unmanned probes through the solar system and beyond. Voyager 1 is now 5.5 billion miles from Earth and has sent back a stunning collection of photos of our celestial neighbors. Vast numbers of them can be accessed on the Web in the form of unadorned photo archives and illustrations for astronomy lessons. So forget squinting into telescopes and waiting for clear nights. See it all on your desktop.
The Jet Propulsion Laboratory handles NASA's unmanned deep-space probes, and so you'd expect its on-line image archive to blow you away. It does. You can get both screen-size and full-resolution images from the earliest missions to the present: Magellan, Viking, Voyager, Galileo, and Cassini through the planned Pluto Express. The browser images are huge, ranging from 120K to 250K, and the full-resolution images are even bigger: You're lucky if they're under 30MB. If you're tracking El Nino, false-color images of the Earth's oceans are updated every three days. While the site is not arranged as an astronomy lesson, there are FAQs on various astronomical subjects aimed at teachers. You'll also find updates on lab projects such as Voyager 1's current distance from Earth.
NASA's National Space Science Data Center (NSSDC) Photo Gallery lives up to its name. There's a little of everything: planets, asteroids and comets, full-color "deep sky" objects such as nebulae and galaxies, and spacecraft. What's staggering and humbling are the family portraits of the Earth and moon together, taken by deep space probes while looking backwards toward home. The photos are indexed by subject and mission, but you won't find companion data sheets. Look instead at the meaty FAQ files on the planets.
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The 21 fragments of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 that collided with Jupiter in July 1994 produced images more spectacular than anyone anticipated. The site had almost 2 million accesses during the month of July 1994 and more than 2 million since. You'll find more than 1,000 images culled from 8 space probes and 64 terrestrial observatories, scientific papers concerning the impact, and MPEG animations. The NSSDC also houses a well-indexed archive of about 500 Shoemaker-Levy images.
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The Los Alamos National Laboratory of the U.S. Department of Energy offers, for some reason, an excellent overview presentation of the solar system. It's well-organized and contains well-chosen material. You'll see things you'll find nowhere else, such as an elevation map of Mars, pictures of Martian sand dunes, and treatment of the huge Martian shield volcanoes.
NASA's Space Telescope Science Institute's Education and Public Affairs Office maintains a collection of images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. The site's 1990-1995 Greatest Hits section is well-named, since it offers stunning images of nebulae, galaxies, and other cosmic objects, plus planetary events including the SL-9 impact on Jupiter and a storm on Saturn. There are also some MPEG animations; mostly artists' visualizations of astronomical events. Hubble photos of astronomical objects are also available at the NSSDC Photo Gallery of Astronomical Objects.
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Welcome to the Planets has a selection of the best images from NASA's planetary exploration program. It includes geophysical data plus background technical material on the various space probes.
The Regional Planetary Imaging Facility at the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum has an extensive collection of images from space probes and space missions aimed at planetary researchers. After you select a planet through an interactive form, you get data sheets with thumbnail versions of the images and a few sentences concerning the significance of each. Then, of course, you can call up the full-sized images.
For a meta-view, check out the Planetary Image Finders list of links, which provides a guide to some of NASA's planetary image archives.
The Nine Planets holds a fine assortment of Mars images, including dust storms, specific surface features, and, of course, the face.
Photos of Mars' face undergo rigorous, dispassionate technical analysis at this site, which offers a catalog of every image that contains the face. (The two famous tabloid shots have a resolution of 40 to 50 meters per pixel, and others show from several meters to several hundred meters per pixel.) Scientists have used them to reconstruct the terrain of the face and display it from various near-surface angles. The result is not convincingly facial. Basically, you've got an oblong mesa with a central lengthwise ridge: the outline and the nose. Eroded declivities cut into the ridge, creating the eyes and mouth. And that's it. Sorry.
Yes, there are footprints on the moon. And we've got heaps of photos to prove it. NASA's Lunar Exploration Archives hold images from the 1964 Ranger probes through the 1994 Clementine mission. You'll also find material from the Russian probes starting in 1959 and images of manned mission images, plus a separate Apollo 11 section that includes audio clips.
SkyView is a virtual observatory that can generate an image of any part of the sky you select in whatever wavelength you choose.
On or about February 14, 1996, the object Chiron (a member of the enigmatic Centaur class of heavy comets) will reach its perihelion (closest approach to the sun), and on April 1 will reach its closest point to Earth. Observations are gearing up on-line.
The Imagery Services Branch of NASA's Johnson Space Center is mostly concerned with space mission photos, but of course that means you can find lunar surface images there, too.
Sorry, you can't download moon rocks. But NASA's Curator for Planetary Materials Samples will tell you what has been done with the 842 pounds of samples brought back by the Apollo astronauts, certain Antarctic meteorites now known to have come from the moon, and cosmic dust scooped up in the stratosphere or scraped off space ships. You'll see information about how to borrow moon rocks, too, although we think you'll have to do more than just ask politely.
The people at the Center for Mars Exploration grapple with this and other puzzles. They offer not only the daily Martian weather map, but also a global map of Mars that lets you zoom in on selected locales. (The associated Mars Atlas includes an image of the Martian globe borne by the god Atlas, who has sprouted a little green insectile head. C'mon, guys.) View various global and feature photos of Mars, plus an MPEG of Mars rotating, not to mention scientific papers concerning Mars-related research.
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The Martian Chronicle: The Electronic Newsletter for Mars Exploration is pushing hard for human exploration of Mars. And you can go with them. . .at least on-line.
You can stare at the sun without going blind at the Solar Data Analysis Center, which has images of the sun (usually from that day or the day before) in various forms (x-ray, magnetogram, spectroheliogram, and others) from the Japanese Yohkoh satellite and the several U.S. National Solar Observatories. These sometimes-spectacular images prove that the sun is far more than a bright dot in the sky.
NASA's Planetary Data System distributes data sets from past and present planetary missions. If you don't know what a data set is, you won't be interested, but the site also includes links to other educational and image-related sites. Meanwhile, its Imaging Node offers vast amounts of raw image data, apparently including every Mars surface photo taken by the Viking landers.
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You can see a large number of images sent back by the Clementine probe with links to other Clementine collections.
Earth counts as a planet at NASA's Mission to Planet Earth, which covers efforts to monitor climatic global change.
For a good source of current research into unanswered questions concerning the space environment, the moon, and Mars, check out the Planetary Science Branch of NASA's Exploration Division.
Who would be so frivolous as to seriously propose that there could be life on Mars? Well, NASA, for one. Biology experiments were included in the Viking landers, and the results are described as "enigmatic." According to The Mars Soil Oxidant: A Science Puzzle, "Oxygen gas evolved when the (Martian) soil was exposed to water vapor, and carbon dioxide evolved upon adding an aqueous solution with organic nutrients."
If you ever get serious about writing your own space-travel software, you'll need physical data on the planets and some minor bodies: mass, rotation speeds, and atmospheric composition are a mere sample of available data.
If you want radar images taken from orbit (great for highlighting topography), try the JPL's rich collection.
by Lamont Wood