tag

#planetary

9 reading cards on “planetary”, in chronological order. Part of the full archive.

  1. A high-resolution Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera image of a lobate thrust-fault scarp on the Moon, a low stair-step cliff cutting across the cratered surface, with boulder fields visible on the upthrown side
    2026-05-26

    A Moon Still Moving

    Its interior is still cooling — and its crust is still breaking.

    The Moon looks geologically dead. Its crust says otherwise.
  2. An artist's concept of Europa Clipper flying above Europa's icy surface.
    2026-05-07

    The Oceans of Jupiter's Moons

    Beneath the ice, an entire hydrosphere waits in silence.

    The four points of light beside Jupiter, easily seen with binoculars, are not stars. Beneath the ice of at least one of them, an ocean is waiting.
  3. Noctilucent clouds observed from the International Space Station
    2026-05-07

    Noctilucent Clouds

    Ice crystals at the edge of space, glowing after sunset.

    There is a kind of cloud you can only see when the Sun has already set on you but is still rising on it. Eighty kilometres up, in air drier than any desert, ice has somehow learned to form.
  4. Artist's concept of Voyager 2 crossing the heliopause into interstellar space
    2026-05-07

    The Solar Neighbourhood

    Interstellar matter flows through our planetary system — and has for billions of years.

    The Solar System is not sailing through empty space. It is moving through a cloud — and through that cloud's history.
  5. Natural-colour mosaic of Saturn and its ring system from the Cassini spacecraft
    2026-05-07

    How Saturn Got Its Rings

    A lost moon, a broken resonance, and a planet that devoured its own child.

    The rings of Saturn look ancient and are not. Two unrelated mysteries about the planet — their youth and its tilt — turn out to share a single, violent answer.
  6. Image of Io showing active volcanic plumes acquired during Galileo's ninth orbit (C9) around Jupiter
    2026-05-07

    Extraterrestrial Volcanoes

    Named after the God of Fire — and found on worlds far beyond our own.

    The conviction that Earth was the only living world geologically lasted as long as we had not looked closely. Voyager 1 ended it in three days.
  7. The terminator line seen from the Apollo11
    2026-05-07

    The Terminator

    The line that separates day from night — sweeping the Earth at 1,600 km/h.

    Twice every day, a moving line crosses every place on Earth at the speed of a jet airliner. We see it as a sunrise. The Moon shows the same line in cleaner form.
  8. This image, acquired by the Left Mastcam-Z camera aboard NASA's Perseverance rover, reveals a rock displaying distinctive black-and-white banding on the Martian surface.
    2026-05-07

    Stones from Mars

    How we proved that pieces of the Red Planet have been falling to Earth all along.

    There are stones in our museums whose journey began on another world. The proof took twenty years to assemble — and one decisive measurement of trapped gas.
  9. Earthset captured through the Orion spacecraft window as the crescent Earth sinks behind the Moon's far side during the Artemis II flyby
    2026-05-06

    Artemis II

    Fifty-four years of silence, then an Earthset.

    Half a century after Apollo 17, four astronauts boarded a spacecraft pointed at the Moon — and discovered the silence behind it had been waiting for them.