It just breaks my heart that we haven't sent people to Mars yet. It's so silly that we waste so many resources, and we don't do something worthwhile like exploring the solar system. We should have condos on Neptune by now. But I suppose it's just as well we spend billions for illegal immigrant healthcare.
Springtime is blooming on Neptune! This might sound like an oxymoron because Neptune is the farthest and coldest of the major planets. But NASA Hubble Space Telescope observations are revealing an increase in Neptune's brightness in the southern hemisphere, which is considered a harbinger of seasonal change, say astronomers.Based on the weather, housing should be relatively inexpensive.
Observations of Neptune made over six years by a group of scientists from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) show a distinct increase in the amount and brightness of the banded cloud features located mostly in the planet's southern hemisphere.
"Neptune's cloud bands have been getting wider and brighter," says Lawrence A. Sromovsky, a senior scientist at University of Wisconsin- Madison's Space Science and Engineering Center and a leading authority on Neptune's atmosphere. "This change seems to be a response to seasonal variations in sunlight, like the seasonal changes we see on Earth."
The findings are reported in the current issue (May, 2003) of Icarus, a leading planetary science journal.
Neptune, the eighth planet from the Sun, is known for its weird and violent weather. It has massive storm systems and ferocious winds that sometimes gust to 900 miles per hour, but the new Hubble observations are the first to suggest that the planet undergoes a change of seasons.