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IMAGE: An SwRI-led study identifies plumes of airborne dust emanating from sources inside gullies at Mars Russell crater megadune in the Martian spring. The plume phenomena support the hypothesis that CO2. view more
Credit: NASA/JPL/Malin Space Systems (CTX) & NASA/JPL/University of Arizona (HiRISE)]
SAN ANTONIO Feb. 24, 2021 A Southwest Research Institute® (SwRI®) scientist examined 11 Mars years of image data to understand the seasonal processes that create linear gullies on the slopes of the megadune in the Russell crater on Mars. In early spring images, captured by two different cameras on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, SwRI s Dr. Cynthia Dinwiddie noticed airborne plumes of dusty material associated with the linear dune gullies on the sand dune s downwind slope. These clues point to active processes involving chunks of frozen CO2, or dry ice, sliding down the sand dune, kicking up sand and dust along the way.
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IMAGE: When flying past Venus in July 2020, Parker Solar Probe s WISPR instrument, short for Wide-field Imager for Parker Solar Probe, detected a bright rim around the edge of the planet. view more
Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins APL/Naval Research Laboratory/Guillermo Stenborg and Brendan Gallagher
NASA s Parker Solar Probe captured stunning views of Venus during its close flyby of the planet in July 2020.
Though Parker Solar Probe s focus is the Sun, Venus plays a critical role in the mission: The spacecraft whips by Venus a total of seven times over the course of its seven-year mission, using the planet s gravity to bend the spacecraft s orbit. These Venus gravity assists allow Parker Solar Probe to fly closer and closer to the Sun on its mission to study the dynamics of the solar wind close to its source.
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IMAGE: SwRI scientists studied the area imaged by Juno s UVS instrument on April 10, 2020, and determined that a large meteoroid had exploded in a bright fireball in Jupiter s upper atmosphere.. view more
Credit: SwRI
SAN ANTONIO Feb. 22, 2021 From aboard the Juno spacecraft, a Southwest Research Institute-led instrument observing auroras serendipitously spotted a bright flash above Jupiter s clouds last spring. The Ultraviolet Spectrograph (UVS) team studied the data and determined that they had captured a bolide, an extremely bright meteoroid explosion in the gas giant s upper atmosphere. Jupiter undergoes a huge number of impacts per year, much more than the Earth, so impacts themselves are not rare, said SwRI s Dr. Rohini Giles, lead author of a paper outlining these findings in
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IMAGE: Artistic visualization of the Sun s magnetic field in the active region observed by CLASP2 view more
Credit: Gabriel Pérez Díaz, SMM (IAC).
Every day space telescopes provide spectacular images of the solar activity. However, their instruments are blind to its main driver: the magnetic field in the outer layers of the solar atmosphere, where the explosive events that occasionally affect the Earth occur. The extraordinary observations of the polarization of the Sun s ultraviolet light achieved by the CLASP2 mission have made it possible to map the magnetic field throughout the entire solar atmosphere, from the photosphere until the base of the extremely hot corona. This investigation, published today in the journal