Picture Of The Day 2 - November 14, 2018

Picture of the Day 2 - January 3, 2019

A heavily cratered ice-world. This one is to make up for the missed picture of the day yesterday.

Space Engine System ID: RS 5613-489-8-16684327-414 5 to visit the planet in Space Engine

Busy & Hazy Sky

Picture of the Day 2 - October 23, 2018

Another beautiful aurora shot, looking towards a gas giant under a hazy atmosphere. The Andromeda galaxy is visible to the right of the picture as a hazy bright spot just below the aurora.

The Andromeda Galaxy will be the next galaxy I will be exploring in space engine beginning next month.

Lonely Moon

Picture of the Day - October 19, 2018

Small moon passing in front of a large Super-Earth type planet.

Lunar Shadow

Picture of the Day - October 14, 2018

Small satellite casting its shadow across a gas giant.

Picture of the day 2 - November 23, 2018

Two moons transit in front of a large Titan-Like world with methane oceans.

Space Engine System ID: RS 5581-14-7-1797564-12533 6

Picture of the day 2 - December 21, 2018

Dwarf planet it’s moon. Part of the Insight A System.

Gas giant with violet-colored clouds and rings.

Picture of the Day 2 - January 16, 2019

A planet and it's moon burn under the glare of 4 suns.

Space Engine System ID: RS 8550-3584-5-403-110 B1.1

Mars Express finds evidence of liquid water under Martian pole

A ground-penetrating radar aboard the European Space Agency’s Mars Express satellite has found evidence for a pool of liquid water, a potentially habitable environment, buried under layers of ice and dust at the red planet’s south pole.

“This subsurface anomaly on Mars has radar properties matching water or water-rich sediments,” said Roberto Orosei, principal investigator of the Mars Advanced Radar for Subsurface and Ionosphere Sounding instrument, or MARSIS, lead author of a paper in the journal Science describing the discovery.

The conclusion is based on observations of a relatively small area of Mars, but “it is an exciting prospect to think there could be more of these underground pockets of water elsewhere, yet to be discovered,” added Orosei.

Scientists have long theorised the presence of subsurface pools under the martian poles where the melting point of water could be decreased due to the weight of overlying layers of ice. The presence of salts in the Martian soil also would act to reduce the melting point and, perhaps, keep water liquid even at sub-freezing temperatures.

Earlier observations by MARSIS were inconclusive, but researchers developed new techniques to improve resolution and accuracy.

“We’d seen hints of interesting subsurface features for years but we couldn’t reproduce the result from orbit to orbit, because the sampling rates and resolution of our data was previously too low,” said Andrea Cicchetti, MARSIS operations manager.

“We had to come up with a new operating mode to bypass some onboard processing and trigger a higher sampling rate and thus improve the resolution of the footprint of our dataset. Now we see things that simply were not possible before.”

MARSIS works by firing penetrating radar beams at the surface of Mars and then measuring the strength of the signals as they are reflected back to the spacecraft.

The data indicating water came from a 200-kilometre-wide (124-mile-wide) area that shows the south polar region features multiple layers of ice and dust down to a depth of about 1.5 kilometres (0.9 miles). A particularly bright reflection below the layered deposits can be seen in a zone measuring about 20 kilometres (12 miles) across.

Orosei’s team interprets the bright reflection as the interface between overlying ice and a pool or pond of liquid water. The pool must be at least several centimetres thick for the MARSIS instrument to detect it.

“The long duration of Mars Express, and the exhausting effort made by the radar team to overcome many analytical challenges, enabled this much-awaited result, demonstrating that the mission and its payload still have a great science potential,” says Dmitri Titov, ESA’s Mars Express project scientist.

The discovery is significant because it raises the possibility, at least, of potentially habitable sub-surface environments.

“Some forms of microbial life are known to thrive in Earth’s subglacial environments, but could underground pockets of salty, sediment-rich liquid water on Mars also provide a suitable habitat, either now or in the past?” ESA asked in a statement. “Whether life has ever existed on Mars remains an open question.”

source

O’Srius System - Post 3 (Stunning World)

Here we come across the smaller component of a double planetary system, being the 9 and 10th planets from the star. This planet is by far the most visually stunning world I have come across in the 6 months of playing space engine.

The world is roughly the same size as Earth, but only 0.58 times the mass. The surface is covered in liquid nitrogen oceans and nitrogen ice-caps. The planet has a surface temperature of 68 K or -337 °F. The atmosphere is composed of nitrogen and argon with a surface pressure of 0.095 atmospheres. The surface has a nitrogen cycle, much the same as Earth has a water cycle.

High Resolution Pics

Picture 1 - Crescent

Picture 2 - Gibbous

Picture 3 -

Picture 4 - River Channels

Picture 5 - Varied terrain

Picture 6 - Polar Cap

Picture 7 - Nitrogen Shoreline