![]() ![]() This image was first published on 20 July 2017. Meanwhile, the opposite is true for Deimos: its orbit is slowly taking it away from Mars. Phobos is gradually spiraling in towards Mars and within 50 million years will likely either break up due to the planet’s gravity, or crash into its surface. ![]() While the origin of the moons is much debated, their fate is inevitable. Sibling Deimos orbits much further out, at a distance of some 23 500 km. It also orbits incredibly close to Mars, just 6000 km above the planet, making it closer to its parent planet than any other moon in the Solar System. Because the moon is so small, just 27×22×18 km, it appears star-like in the images. Over the course of 22 minutes, Hubble took 13 separate exposures, allowing astronomers to create a timelapse video showing the movement of Phobos around its host planet. The observations were intended to photograph Mars while it was on its closest approach to Earth along its orbit, so the moon’s cameo appearance was a bonus. The sharp eye of the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope captured the tiny moon Phobos during its orbital trek around Mars on. Additional processing was done to compensate for asynchronous imaging in the colour filters and other effects. This colour image is a composite of three separate colour exposures (red, blue and green) made by WFC3. (The Great Red Spot and the smaller Red Oval are both out of view on the other side of the planet.) For example, the image suggests that dark “barges” - tracked by amateur astronomers on a nightly basis - may differ both in form and colour from barge features identified by the Voyager spacecraft. Such data complement the images taken from other telescopes and spacecraft by providing exquisite details of atmospheric phenomena. When these opposing flows interact, turbulence appears. These bands are produced by the atmosphere flowing in different directions at various places. The planet is wrapped in bands of yellow, brown and white clouds. In addition to the fresh impact, the image reveals a spectacular variety of shapes in the swirling atmosphere of Jupiter. The dark smudge at bottom right is debris from a comet or asteroid that plunged into Jupiter’s atmosphere and disintegrated. Jupiter was more than 600 million kilometres from Earth when the images were taken. Each pixel in this high-resolution image spans about 119 kilometres in Jupiter’s atmosphere. It is the sharpest visible-light picture of Jupiter since the New Horizons spacecraft flew by that planet in 2007. This Hubble picture, taken on 23 July, is the first full-disc, natural-colour image of Jupiter made with Hubble’s new camera, the Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3). This image, also featured on the Earth from Space video programme, was captured by the Copernicus Sentinel-2B satellite on. ESA’s CryoSat and the Coperncius Sentinel-3 satellites carry radar altimeters. ![]() This makes the area ideal for calibrating satellite radar altimeters – a kind of radar instrument that measures surface topography. ![]() On the whole, the Salar de Uyuni is very flat, with a surface elevation variation of less than 1 m. In the lower right we can see the 20 km-wide alluvial fan of the Rio Grande de Lípez delta. The surrounding terrain is rough in comparison to the vast salt flat. Lithium is used in the manufacturing of batteries, and the increasing demand has significantly increased its value in recent years – especially for the production of electric-car batteries. The geometric shapes in the upper left are large evaporation ponds of the national lithium plant, where lithium bicarbonate is isolated from salt brine. But the Uyuni is also one of the richest lithium deposits in the world, at an estimated 9 million tonnes. Salt from the pan has been traditionally harvested by the local Aymara people, who still predominate in the area. Some 40 000 years ago, this area was part of a giant prehistoric lake that dried out, leaving behind the salt flat. Occupying over 10 000 sq km, the vast Salar de Uyuni lies at the southern end of the Altiplano, a high plain of inland drainage in the central Andes. The image shows part of Bolivia’s Salar de Uyuni – the largest salt flat in the world. ![]()
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