NASA ESA Hubble Telescope Photo of Mars with a Comet C/2103 A1

A NASA Hubble Space Telescope composite image shows the positions of comet Siding Spring and Mars as the comet streaked by the red planet, at 2:28 p.m. EDT on Oct. 19, 2014. 

Credit: NASA, ESA, PSI, JHU/APL, STScI/AURA

The famed Hubble Space Telscope has captured a jaw-dropping view of a comet making an incredibly close flyby of Mars.

The space telescope snapped the amazing image when Comet Siding Spring (also called C/2013 A1) was hurtling through space near the Red Planet on Oct. 18 and Oct. 19.

During its closest approach on Oct. 19, the comet passed about 86,000 miles (138,000 kilometers) from Mars, just one-third of the distance between Earth and the moon.

Mars and the comet shine in Hubble's new image. The planet glows red, and Comet Siding Spring's bright nucleus and diffuse tail stand out against a host of background stars glimmering behind the two cosmic bodies.

The photo was created by combining separate images of the comet and Mars taken over the weekend.

"The Mars and comet images have been added together to create a single picture to illustrate the angular separation, or distance, between the comet and Mars at closest approach," NASA officials said in a statement.

ESA /NASA's Hubble telescope finds Kuiper belt targets for New Horizons Pluto mission

This is an artist's impression of a Kuiper Belt object (KBO), located on the outer rim of our solar system at a staggering distance of 4 billion miles from the Sun. 

Unlike asteroids, KBOs have not been significantly heated by the Sun, and so are thought to represent a pristine, well preserved, deep-freeze sample of what the outer solar system was like following its birth 4.6 billion years ago. 

A Hubble survey uncovered three KBOs, ranging from 27 to 35 miles across, that are potentially reachable by NASA's New Horizons spacecraft after it passes by Pluto in mid-2015. 

The Sun appears as a bright star at image center in this graphic, which represents the view from the KBO. 

The Earth and other inner planets are too close to the Sun to be seen in this illustration. 

The bright "star" to the left of the Sun is the planet Jupiter, and the bright object below the Sun is the planet Saturn. 

Two bright pinpoints of light to the right of the Sun, midway to the edge of the frame, are the planets Uranus and Neptune, respectively. 

The planet positions are plotted for late 2018 when the New Horizons probe reaches a distance of 4 billion miles from the Sun. The Milky Way appears in the background. 

Credit: NASA, ESA, and G. Bacon (STScI)

NASA's New Horizons Spacecraft showing the Scientific Instrument Payload.

Credit: Nasa

Peering out to the dim, outer reaches of our solar system, ESA /NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has uncovered three Kuiper Belt objects (KBOs) the agency's New Horizons spacecraft could potentially visit after it flies by Pluto in July 2015.

The KBOs were detected through a dedicated Hubble observing program by a New Horizons search team that was awarded telescope time for this purpose.

The NASA New Horizons Mission Timeline. (Click on the image to see the full HD imnage)

Credit: Nasa

"This has been a very challenging search, and it's great that in the end Hubble could accomplish a detection, one NASA mission helping another," said Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) in Boulder, Colorado, principal investigator of the New Horizons mission.

The Kuiper Belt is a vast rim of primordial debris encircling our solar system. KBOs belong to a unique class of solar system objects that has never been visited by spacecraft and which contain clues to the origin of our solar system.

The KBOs that Hubble found are each about 10 times larger than typical comets, but only about 1-2 percent of the size of Pluto.

Unlike asteroids, KBOs have not been heated by the Sun, and are thought to represent a pristine, well preserved, deep-freeze sample of what the outer solar system was like following its birth 4.6 billion years ago.

The KBOs found in the Hubble data are thought to be the building blocks of dwarf planets such as Pluto.

The New Horizons team started to look for suitable KBOs in 2011 using some of the largest ground-based telescopes on Earth.

They found several dozen KBOs, but none were reachable within the fuel supply available aboard the New Horizons spacecraft.

"We started to get worried that we could not find anything suitable, even with Hubble, but in the end the space telescope came to the rescue," said New Horizons science team member John Spencer of SwRI.

"There was a huge sigh of relief when we found suitable KBOs; we are 'over the moon' about this detection."

Following an initial proof of concept of the Hubble pilot observing program in June, the New Horizons team was awarded telescope time by the Space Telescope Science Institute for a wider survey in July.

When the search was completed in early September, the team identified one KBO that is "definitely reachable" and two other potentially accessible KBOs that will require more tracking over several months to know whether they too are accessible by the New Horizons spacecraft.

This was a needle-in-a-haystack search for the New Horizons team because the elusive KBOs are extremely small, faint, and difficult to pick out against myriad background stars in the constellation Sagittarius, which is in the present direction of Pluto.

The three KBOs identified are each a whopping 1 billion miles beyond Pluto. Two of the KBOs are estimated to be as large as 34 miles (55 kilometers) across, and the third is perhaps as small as 15 miles (25 kilometers).

Hubble Telescope reveals cloudy weather on Exoplanet GJ 1214b

This image shows an artist's view of exoplanet GJ 1214b. Credit: NASA, ESA, & G. Bacon/STScI, STScI-PRC14-06

Weather forecasters on exoplanet GJ 1214b would have an easy job.

Today's forecast: cloudy. Tomorrow: overcast. Extended outlook: more clouds.

A team of scientists led by researchers in the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of Chicago report they have definitively characterized the atmosphere of a super-Earth class planet orbiting another star for the first time.

The planet under scrutiny is known as GJ1214b. It is classified as a super-Earth type planet because its mass is intermediate between those of Earth and Neptune.

Recent searches for planets around other stars ("exoplanets") have shown that super-Earths like GJ 1214b are among the most common type of planets in the Milky Way galaxy.

Because no such planets exist in our Solar System, the physical nature of super-Earths is largely unknown.

Laura Kreidberg

Previous studies of GJ 1214b yielded two possible interpretations of the planet's atmosphere.

Its atmosphere could consist entirely of water vapour or some other type of heavy molecule, or it could contain high-altitude clouds that prevent the observation of what lies underneath.

But now a team of astronomers led by UChicago's Laura Kreidberg and Jacob Bean have detected clear evidence of clouds in the atmosphere of GJ 1214b from data collected with the Hubble Space Telescope.

Jacob Bean

The Hubble observations used 96 hours of telescope time spread over 11 months. This was the largest Hubble program ever devoted to studying a single exoplanet.

The researchers describe their work as an important milestone on the road to identifying potentially habitable, Earth-like planets beyond our Solar System.

The results appear in the Jan. 2 issue of the journal Nature.

This rendering shows the size of GJ 1214b and another, larger exoplanet compared to Earth and Neptune. 

Credit: NASA & ESA, STScI-PRC14-06b

"We really pushed the limits of what is possible with Hubble to make this measurement," said Kreidberg, a third-year graduate student and first author of the new paper.

"This advance lays the foundation for characterizing other Earths with similar techniques."

"I think it's very exciting that we can use a telescope like Hubble that was never designed with this in mind, do these kinds of observations with such exquisite precision, and really nail down some property of a small planet orbiting a distant star," explained Bean, an assistant professor and the project's principal investigator.

More information: "Clouds in the atmosphere of the super-Earth exoplanet GJ 1214b," by Laura Kreidberg, Jacob L. Bean, Jean-Michel Désert, Björn Benneke, Drake Deming, Kevin B. Stevenson, Sara Seager, Zachory Berta-Thompson, Andreas Seifahrt, & Derek Homeier. dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature12888

Related paper: dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature12887

Hubble Telescope Image: Blue planet HD 189733b - Video

A planet discovered in 2005 in the constellation of Vulpecula (the Fox) was determined to be colored blue with the help of the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope.

The blue coloured planet is similar to how the Earth's color looks like from space.

The planet, HD 189733b which is a huge gas giant similar to the planet Jupiter, is 63 light years away and is closely orbiting its host star; around 1/30 the distance the Earth orbits the Sun.

Although the planet comes off with a deep cobalt blue color, its atmosphere is vastly different from that of the Earth.

The HD 189733b's atmosphere has a temperature of over 1000 degrees Celsius, and it rains glass, sideways, in howling 7000 kilometre-per-hour winds. HD 189733b is slightly bigger than the planet Jupiter.

This illustration shows HD 189733b, a huge gas giant that orbits very close to its host star HD 189733.

By observing this planet before, during, and after it disappeared behind its host star during orbit, astronomers were able to deduce that HD 189733b is a deep, azure blue — reminiscent of Earth's colour as seen from space.

Hubble Telescope 23rd Birthday Image: Horsehead Nebula

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has snapped a spectacular new image of an iconic nebula to celebrate its 23 years of peering deep into the heavens.

The Hubble observatory, which launched on April 24, 1990, captured the Horsehead Nebula in infrared light, peering through obscuring veils of dust to reveal the object's hidden features.

"The result is a rather ethereal and fragile-looking structure, made of delicate folds of gas — very different to the nebula’s appearance in visible light," mission officials wrote.

The new observations allowed astronomers to create a dazzling video of the Horsehead Nebula based on Hubble's photos.

The Horsehead Nebula, also known as Barnard 33, is located about 1,500 light-years from Earth in the constellation Orion (The Hunter).

The Horsehead is a huge interstellar cloud of gas and dust, like other nebulae, and the light from a nearby star gives it a beautiful glow.

NASA Hubble Telescope Images: Saturn's Auroras

Credit: Jonathan Nichols, NASA, ESA, University of Leicester

>Saturn's ultraviolet auroras are visible over each pole in this image obtained in 2009 using the Advanced Camera for Surveys on board the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope.

Saturn's aurora, a ghostly ultraviolet glow that illuminates the gas giant's upper atmosphere near the poles, has a heartbeat that pulses in tandem with the planet's radio emissions, scientists have discovered.

The pulsing auroras on Saturn occur about once every 11 Earth hours or so – the length of one day on the ringed planet, researchers found.

"This is an important discovery for two reasons," said study leader Jonathan Nichols of the University of Leicester in England. "First, it provides a long-suspected but hitherto missing link between the radio and auroral emissions, and second, it adds a critical tool in diagnosing the cause of Saturn's irregular heartbeat."