5,
4,
3,
2,
1,
0...
Lift-off!
🚀
⛈️
50 years ago,
Apollo 12 launched into a dark and rainy morning sky.
⁣
⁣
With Apollo 12 at about 6,600 feet altitude,
observers on the ground saw lightning striking the launch pad.
The Saturn V rocket was unaffected and continued to operate normally.
But in Mission Control,
data on controllers’
displays turned garbled.
Luckily,
a quick-thinking flight controller,
John Aaron,
had a fix.
The crew onboard the spacecraft reset an obscure system,
and data returned to the screens in Mission Control.
Once Apollo 12 mission commander Pete Conrad understood the cause of the excitement,
he radioed to Houston,
“I think we need to do a little more all-weather testing.”
⁣
⁣
Five days later on Nov.
19,
1969,
the Apollo 12 lunar module Intrepid landed on the Moon in a region called the Ocean of Storms,
approximately 950 miles west of where Apollo 11 landed and only 535 feet from our robotic Surveyor III mission.⁣
⁣
Images Credit:
NASA⁣
⁣ #apollo #apollo12 #launch #rocket #nasa #history #saturnv

Tiny planet Mercury transits the Sun 👀⁣⁣
⁣⁣
On Nov.
11,
Mercury crossed between Earth and the Sun -
a rare event we won't be able to see again until 2032.
Our Solar Dynamics Observatory,
which views the Sun in a variety of wavelengths of light in the extreme ultraviolet,
tracked Mercury's journey.⁣⁣
⁣⁣
Credit:
NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio ⁣⁣
⁣⁣ #sun #transit #mercury #mercurytransit #solarsystem #nasa

See those swirling clouds that look like cream in coffee?

It’s actually a cyclonic storm in Jupiter’s atmosphere spotted by our @NASAJuno spacecraft during a close flyby!

Juno observed this vortex in a region of Jupiter called the “north north north north temperate belt,”
one of the gas giant planet’s many persistent cloud bands.
These bands are formed by the prevailing winds at different latitudes.
The vortex seen here is roughly 1,200 miles (2,000 kilometers)
wide.

Citizen scientist Kevin M.
Gill created this image using data from the spacecraft's JunoCam imager when the spacecraft was about 5,300 miles (8,500 kilometers)
from Jupiter’s cloud tops above a latitude of about 49 degrees.

Image credit:
Image data:
NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS Image processing by Kevin M.
Gill,
©
CC BY #NASA #Jupiter #SolarSystem #Swirls #Clouds