Culture

The Best of NASA’s Planet Porn

Outta This World

Need some space? NASA’s got you.

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“To infinity and beyond!”

For NASA, these words earnestly spoken by Buzz Lightyear (and echoed by many children and parents since) are more than a plastic toy’s ironic catchphrase from Toy Story; instead, they define its purpose.

A new book, The Planets: Photographs from the Archives of NASA, offers those of us unable to physically explore the final frontier a chance to see beyond our planet. The tome gives a glimpse of what lies outside the familiar bounds of Earth through photographs taken over the past half century of space exploration—and a forward written by Bill Nye (the Science Guy!).

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While there are some photographs in the collection that portray the planets as we may have seen before, many of the highlights capture pieces of our solar system that seem more like art than fragments of our universe still out of reach of human touch.

Referring to the now-iconic photograph of Earth, Pale Blue Dot, celebrated astronomer Carl Sagan once wrote, “There is perhaps no better a demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world.” With more than 200 striking images, The Planets offers the same poignancy Sagan described, through a brief respite from life on Earth.

With that, here’s some space:

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This enhanced-color MESSENGER image shows Mercury’s epic volcanic plains in the planet’s northern hemisphere. In the bottom right of the image is the Mendelssohn impact basin, which is 181 miles (291 kilometers) in diameter. The large wrinkled ridges indicate cooled lava flows, while the circular rims in the bottom left region are impact craters that were eventually submerged by lava. Near the top of the image, the bright orange area is a pyroclastic vent with fast-moving gas emulsions.

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Magellan captured this image of lava flows from the large Venusian volcano Sif Mons. Scientists believe that the dark plains in the background formed from volcanic eruptions.

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Iran’s Great Salt Desert, Dasht-e Kavir, is pictured in this false-color composite image (in infrared, red, and green wavelengths) taken by Landsat 7, which is part of the longest-running program for satellite imagery of Earth. The massive desert is filled with mud flats and salt marshes. NASA’s World Wind project allows viewers to observe 3-D images taken by Landsat 7.

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This March 2016 photo of a moonset was captured by a flight engineer aboard the International Space Station.

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This is the first photograph of Earth as seen from the Moon. It was taken in 1966 by Lunar Orbiter 1, and was fully reconstructed and corrected in 2015 by the Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project, a project that has recovered and enhanced the original image data from the five spacecraft sent to the Moon in the 1960s by NASA.

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This 2016 image shows the tracks of NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity trailing behind and away from a Martian dust devil—a whirling, fast-moving steam of rising hot air that accumulates dust at high speeds.

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The High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera captured this image of Mars’s viscous flow features (VFF), which are formations of ice and rock, similar to Earth’s glaciers, that slowly creep across the middle regions of the red planet. Here, the VFF (the white-blue areas) flow around and combine with mineral deposits from impact ejecta of an ancient impact event (the tan areas protruding from Mars’s surface, on the left side and the upper right of the image).

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This image shows Jupiter’s moon Europa. This colorized composite is the product of NASA’s Galileo spacecraft’s 1997 grayscale images combined with 1998 low-resolution color data. The blue-white areas indicate the presence of water ice; the reddish ones include water ice, as well as hydrated salts (salt molecules loosely attached to water molecules).

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As the southern hemisphere tilts away from the Sun, bringing winter, the reduction in sunlight creates the blue tint seen in this image. This is likely the result of a reduction in ultraviolet sunlight and the haze that it generates, which facilitates the “blueing” due to increased methane absorption, and the scattering of smaller particles. Cassini captured this natural-color view with a composite of several exposures made in July 2013, using red, green, and blue spectral filters.

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This Cassini image was taken in 2005 and features three of the sixty-two moons that orbit Saturn. A heavily cratered moon, Janus is a speck floating directly above the planet’s rings and just left of the planet itself. The moon Pandora is to the right of Janus and sitting directly atop (as if it were touching) the bright ring, while massive Enceladus is the largest bright spot, just above Pandora and in the upper right of the image. This is a raw image, which means the data in the image has not yet been processed or calibrated by NASA.

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Saturn’s fourth-largest moon, Dione, is pictured during a close Cassini flyby in June 2015, while Enceladus is a bright and distant spot just above Saturn’s rings in the upper right.

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This 2005 Hubble image features a pair of newly discovered, faint, enormous rings circling Uranus, beyond its known ring system (the bright formations within the black space). The largest of the rings, visible at the top and bottom of the image, is twice the diameter of the previously known ring system. The second ring in the pair is visible as two bright smudges oriented outside the known ring system and within the large ring. The rings are also interacting with two previously undiscovered moons, Mab and Cupid (not visible in image).

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In this image, Neptune’s narrow, outermost ring contains three brighter sections or arcs; this indicates that material is denser and unevenly clustered in these places. Scientists are puzzled by this, as the laws of motion dictate that material should be distributed evenly throughout the rings

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This high-resolution image of Pluto was captured in blue, red, and infrared filters. It features a region of icy plains that are abundant in nitrogen, carbon monoxide, and methane and is known as Sputnik Planum.

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New Horizons took this image moments before its closest approach to Pluto on July 14, 2015. This enhanced-color photograph displays approximately 330 miles (531 kilometers) of Pluto’s surface, and in it, topographical features as small as 800 feet (244 meters) across can be seen. This image is one piece of the vast, textured, heart-shaped Sputnik Planum, whose surface is covered in welt-like cells of ice ranging from 10 to 30 miles (16 to 48 kilometers) across. The pattern of the cells comes from the thermal convection of the region’s solid nitrogen ice. As the nitrogen is warmed by the dwarf planet’s heat, it rises up in enormous blobs, cools off, sinks back down again, and repeats the process.

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Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko most likely comes from the Kuiper Belt; however, as a Jupiter-family comet, its orbit is determined by the gas giant’s gravitational influences. The comet travels through the solar system within and just beyond the orbit of Jupiter. The European Space Agency’s Rosetta spacecraft synched up with and observed the comet, and on July 14, 2015, Rosetta’s navigation camera (NavCam) captured this image of Comet 67P from roughly 100 miles (161 kilometers) away. Comet 67P has a short orbital period of less than twenty years around the Sun. Like other comets that originated in the Kuiper Belt, Comet 67P was likely flung out of the belt and toward the Sun due to collisions or gravitational disturbances. The gravitational pull of massive planets like Jupiter can change a comet’s orbit over time, and eventually, comets can be ejected out of the solar system altogether—that is, if they don’t collide with another body first.

Photos and captions courtesy of The Planets: Photographs from the Archives of NASA by Nirmala Nataraj, published by Chronicle Books 2017.