io9: map

Plan Your Space Vacation with the First Ever Map of Mercury

Lauren Davis — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 13:00:00 PST

If you're planning a trip to Mercury, you'll need the first map ever released of the solar system's innermost planet, a mosaic of photos from the Mercury missions.

The US Geological Survey's Astrogeology Science Center revealed the first map of Mercury this week at the American Geophysical Union meeting. The map is a composite of 917 images taken from various Mercury flybys. Photos from Messenger's flybys in January 2008, October 2008, and September 2009 account for 90.90 percent of the mosaic, with the rest provided by the Mariner 10 photos from the 1970s. The map is just shy of complete, covering about 97.72 percent of Mercury, but it's the closest thing we have to a complete map of Mercury.

[USGS Astrogeology via Wired]

50 Years, 200 Missions, One Enormous Map

Lauren Davis — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 10:00:00 PDT

Have trouble keeping track of the nearly 200 past and current missions to explore our solar system and beyond? National Geographic's elegant infographic displays 50 years of space exploration in a colorful map of our planetary neighbors.

The "Fifty Years of Exploration" map, created by Sean McNaughton and Samuel Velasco for National Geographic, outlines humanity's journeys into space, starting from the early failed mission to Mars and Venus to the current flight of New Horizons. A complete, but scaled-down version of the map is shown below, but you can see the giant, full-sized map here.

Fifty Years of Exploration [National Geographic via Stevey via Metafilter]

A Vector Map of the Unnamed Methane Sea on Titan

Annalee Newitz — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 07:00:00 PDT

Peter Minton is a California teacher who loves to make vector maps in his spare time. His favorite places to map are islands and coastlines, and so when the Cassini-Huygens probe sent back images from Saturn's moon Titan he was happy to discover the geographical features he loves most. There, on the pole of Titan, was a sea full of islands. An unnamed methane sea, but still mappable using vectoring software. This is the map he created, with longitude and latitude lines.

Minton, who already created vector maps of the islands in this sea, writes:

I went ahead and digitized the shoreline of the unnamed methane sea . . . It is one of the largest bodies of liquid known to exist on this moon of Saturn. This body of liquid methane, ethane and nitrogen is about the size of Lake Superior.

The intrepid map afficionado at Strange Maps blog adds:

The orange opacity of Titan's atmosphere makes the moon appear bigger than it actually is - astronomers have since distinguished between permanent cloud cover and surface, and downgraded it from the first- to the second-largest moon in our system, after Jupiter's satellite Ganymede.
Not until the flyby, in 2004, of the Cassini-Huygens mission could scientists confirm the speculation, first ignited by both Voyager missions and then heightened by Hubble observations, that Titan is the only heavenly body (save Earth) to contain large liquid surfaces - or seas, as non-astronomers would call them. For they seem a bit too small to be labelled oceans.

These seas, or lakes, most probably consisting of methane or another hydrocarbon, can be seen on this page of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena.

This sea is one of the few unnamed large bodies of liquid in the solar system. What should we name it?

EVS-Islands [via Strange Maps]

3D Map of the Milky Way Reveals Billowing Hydrogen Light Clouds

Annalee Newitz — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 11:00:50 PST

This is part of the first 3D map of our home galaxy, the Milky Way. Over 200 thousand objects are included in the map, which was made up of images from a telescope in the Canary Islands that took hydrogen emission-sensitive pictures of the night sky. The result is that the brighter areas show "hotter" spots where stars are being born. Image via Institute of Astronomy/University of Cambridge. Milky Way Mapped in 3D [Discover News]

Are You in a Climate Change Hot Zone?

Annalee Newitz — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 07:30:58 PST

An international team of scientists has crunched the numbers and predicted which areas of the world will be hit hardest by the effects of climate change. They created this map of the "socioclimatic" future of the world. The reddest areas, which include China, India, and the United States, are in the most danger because they suffer from a deadly combination of social problems and lax policies on toxic emissions (it's no coincidence that all three countries are not signatories to the Kyoto Treaty). Check out the stats for yourself. [Eurekalert] Image by Pamela Burroff-Murr/Diffenbaugh et al./Dan Annarino/NOAA.

Welcome to New Brainland

Annalee Newitz — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 06:15:10 PST

Image by Sam Brown [Bioephemera]