Enlarge / Wright Mons, at center. Note the lumpy nature of its flanks extends to other nearby areas. (credit: NASA, Johns Hopkins Univ./APL, Southwest Research Institute) When we look at the features on other bodies in our Solar System, there are often obvious analogs much closer to home. For example, sets of parallel ridges on […]
Enlarge / Pluto’s atmosphere is fairly hazy. (credit: NASA) Saturn’s moon Titan is distinctive, in part for its orange-ish and hazy atmosphere. It’s virtually impossible to see surface features because the haze is so opaque in the visible portion of the spectrum; what we know of it comes from things like radar imagery, instead. The […]
Expand /“What Happens the peaks of Cthulhu?” Isn’t an arcane riddle. (charge: NASA) We can frequently use our understanding of Earth to spell out what we see {} worlds, though we might need to update the physics into account for another temperature or even a tenuous atmosphere. But planetary scientists can not always presume that […]