10 Space Landmarks We'd Like to Visit


TARDIS remote control toy

And we're off. What will be the first stop on our tour of outer space?

© Mike Blake/Reuters/Corbis

10 Space Landmarks We'd Like to Visit

Care for a little space-based sightseeing? Feel the need to study abroad -- really, really abroad? Well, fling away your Fodor's and toss your TripAdvisor, because we have the only guided tour you'll need -- a foray into the final frontier so ambitious it will make the Voyager probes' Grand Tours look like daytrips.

Of course, zipping off to distant planets, moons and stars isn't as simple as thumbing a ride with a Vogon or booking passage with a Corellian smuggler and his Wookiee copilot. We'll have to break a few laws of time and space. There's a good reason Carl Sagan's landmark series, "Cosmos," resorted to a Spaceship of the Imagination: His destinations were mostly unspeakably dangerous or unreachably distant. And then there's the problem of time: Because light obeys a speed limit, our pictures of stellar objects are actually images of the past. By the time we reach them, they might have changed or ceased to exist.

Fortunately, we recently found an indestructible, time-traveling ship in a box of TARDIS Flakes (part of a past or future nutritious breakfast). It comes complete with scanners that detect all spectra, so we're guaranteed not to miss sights better seen in ultraviolet, infrared or X-ray. So, without further ado (and as another space-time traveler would say) ... allons-y!

moon footprint


Image courtesy NASA

10: The Moon: Sea of Tranquility




Olympus Mons

You just can't tell from that shot of Olympus Mons how very sprawling the Martian volcano is. You have to see it to believe it.

© Corbis

9: Mars: The Tharsis Bulge

Choosing a land feature that sprawls across a quarter of Mars might seem like cheating, but it's our list, so we make the rules. Sure, we could have chosen Olympus Mons, a shield volcano the size of Arizona and three times the height of Mount Everest, but how would exploring that monster be any easier? Or, continuing eastward past its three smaller sisters in the Tharsis Montes group -- which range from 210-270 miles (350-450 kilometers) across and rise 9 miles (15 kilometers) above their surroundings -- we could shoot down the Valles Marineris. Longer than the United States is wide, the grandest canyon of all girdles one-fifth of the planet, running more than 2,500 miles (4,000 kilometers). Indeed, its 120-mile (200-kilometer) width and 4.3-mile (7-kilometer) depth make our Grand Canyon look like a side gulley [sources: Miller; NASA; NASA].

But wait, we hear you say into your subspace communicator, doesn't this constitute a series of landmarks? Not according to some theories about the region's history, which argue that the Tharsis formation is actually one gigantic volcano (based on a broader definition that includes underlying tectonics and magma flows). Under this model, even the titanic Olympus Mons is but a wart on the face of the solar system's vastest volcano [source: Fazekas].

Jupiter's Great Red Spot

Mosaic of Jupiter's Great Red Spot, as seen by Voyager 1

Image courtesy NASA, JPL

8: Jupiter: The Great Red Spot(s)

If you were looking for one landmark to distinguish our solar system -- sort of a "turn left at the burned-out Chuck E. Cheese" on an astronomical scale -- you could do far worse than Jupiter's Great Red Spot (GRS) -- or rather, spots. In 2000, the Hubble Space Telescope witnessed a second spot, nicknamed "Red Jr.," arise from the collision of three smaller spots. In 2008, Hubble spotted a third [sources: Daniels; Phillips].

The fact is, these cyclonal beauty marks whirl about the faces of the other gas giants, too, and possibly on their close cousins, the cool, starlike bodies called brown dwarfs. They just tend to come and go. And that's what makes Jupiter's two-to-three-Earth-wide anticyclone so special: Depending on whom you ask, it's been spinning for at least 136 years, and possibly longer than 349. Why the age gap? We know today's GRS was described by American astronomer Carr Walter Pritchett in 1878, but some believe it's the same "permanent spot" observed by Italian astronomer Gian Domenico Cassini in 1665 [sources: Encyclopaedia Britannica; Clavin; Daniels].

As for scenic overlooks, we recommend keeping your distance, both to take it all in and to avoid its 250-mph (400-kph) peripheral winds [source: Encyclopaedia Britannica].

Europa geyser

Artist's concept of one of Europa's water vapor plumes, which seem as though they could very well put Earth's geysers to shame.

Image courtesy NASA/ESA/K. Retherford/SWRI

7: Europa: Come for the Geysers, Stay for the Submarine Rides

Yellowstone National Park's Old Faithful is a superheated squirt gun compared to the geysers found on Jupiter's fourth-largest moon, Europa. Roughly the size of Earth's moon, its jets spew water more than 125 miles (201 kilometers) high when squeezed by the gravitational tidal forces of the gas giant and its major satellites [sources: Daniels; Lemonick].

Europa's icy surface makes it cue-ball smooth compared to Jupiter's other Galilean satellites (the four largest of Jupiter's 50-67 moons). Still, its icy surface possesses an exotic beauty traced out in veiny fractures across its crisscrossed shell. These cracks hint at the moon's possible structure, which scientists believe consists of a mile-thick icy covering overlaying a subsurface ocean. The same gravitational forces that drive Europa's geyser activity could provide enough energy to keep water from freezing solid, even on a moon half a billion miles from the sun. The plumes could also erupt from smaller lakes or ponds trapped in the ice [sources: Cook et al.; Daniels; Lemonick; NASA].

Europa's liquid saltwater ocean, which could reach 100 miles deep, explains why we recommend this moon's fountains over the ice-and-dust geysers of Saturn's Enceladus; outside of Earth, it alone offers a chance to dive a submarine into waters potentially populated by extraterrestrial life [sources: Cook et al.; Daniels; Lemonick].



Image courtesy NASA/JPL/SSI

6: Titan: Lounging by the Lake, Dancing in the Methane Rain





How about this for Eris' slogan? Cold and lonely but conveniently located.

Image courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech

5: Eris: Making Trouble Between the Kuiper Belt and Oort Cloud

Take a trip to the wrong side of the tracks -- and, by tracks, we mean the Kuiper Belt, the doughnut-shaped ring of icy worlds and short-period comets circling beyond Neptune's orbit.

Out there drifts the troublemaker, a gleaming dwarf planet so cold (minus 359 to minus 405 F, or minus 217 C to minus 243 C) that its thin atmosphere freezes, falls and glazes it like a moon-sized doughnut hole. Namesake of the Greek goddess of discord, Eris earned its official label from its role in Pluto's rancorous demotion from planetary status. The discovery of additional planets past Neptune -- particularly Eris, which then seemed larger than Pluto, but might be smaller -- convinced astronomers that the ninth world should be reclassified as a dwarf planet. Its sole moon is named for Eris' daughter, Dysnomia, goddess of lawlessness [source: NASA].

Eris is too distant to see well, but we know it reflects light as brightly as newly fallen snow and takes 557 years to orbit the sun. As the solar system's most distant dwarf planet, it's second only to Pluto as a Kuiper Belt staging ground, and makes a better jumping-off point for the Oort cloud -- the shell of long-period comets and icy bodies located around 5,000-100,000 astronomical units (AU) from the sun. Both merit a trip: Visiting them is like traveling back in time to the solar system's earliest days [sources: Martin; NASA].

nomad planet


Image courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech

4: PSO J318.5-22: Rogue Planet




Gliese 581g


Image courtesy Lynette Cook

3: Gliese 581g: A Little Taste of Home (or at Least Habitability)




NGC 604

Like fireworks, but better.


2: NGC 604: A Mother of a Stellar Nursery




Supermassive black hole

This illustration shows a galaxy with a supermassive black hole at its core. (The black hole is also shooting out radio waves.)

Image courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech

1: NGC 1277's Supermassive Black Hole

How better to top off the ultimate space-time sightseeing trip than with a slow plunge into a realm where time and space get tied into the physics equivalent of balloon animals?

We're referring, of course, to a black hole -- a supermassive one. Go big or go home, right? Sure, but there's a better reason: In a smaller black hole, your trip would zip by in an eyeblink; even assuming you could survive its steeper 1-million-G taffy-pull of tidal forces, you would hit the singularity just 0.0001 seconds after flashing across the event horizon. Conversely, in supermassive black holes, the event horizon's gravity "slope" is much gentler -- less than one Earth gravity -- and the trip lasts entire seconds. So welcome to the most monstrous black hole yet found, the 17-billion-solar-mass monster that dominates the galaxy NGC 1277 [sources: Crockett; Hamilton].

As you fall on your slow curve, the starfield takes on the colorful whorls of soap bubbles. Space-time tricks your binocular vision, twisting and jumbling light. Finally, just before known physics takes a permanent powder, the universe crushes down into a halo of blue light, bookended above and below by spectral redshifts [source: Hamilton].

After that, who knows? You're in a ship that defies physics, in a region of space that breaks its laws. Anything is possible, so bring a clean change of underwear and, wherever you end up, start your own list of places to see. We're counting on you.

Lots More Information

Author's Note: 10 Space Landmarks We'd Like to Visit

When compiling a list so close to my heart, the hardest part is settling on only 10 destinations. Had I had more space, I might have recommended visiting the crater-cutting cliff of Mercury's Beagle Rupes, or seeing what destruction Venus' temperatures and pressures have wrought on the Venera probes. Moon-wise, I'd have dispatched you to Jupiter's Ganymede, which is so large (three-quarters the size of Mars) that it would be considered a planet if it orbited the sun; pizza-faced, volcanic Io; the ridges of Saturn's Iapetus; or Neptune's moon, Triton, a nitrogen-frosted cantaloupe orbiting at 157 degrees to the orbital plane, which one day might go to pieces and grant its planet even grander rings than Saturn.

More exotic delights beckoned beyond the solar system, including Hoag's Object, a strange ring galaxy, and its thematic counterpart, the "Eye of Sauron" created by a luminous ring orbiting the star Fomalhaut. There was the pink planet, GJ 504b, or the blacker-than-pitch planet, TrES-2b, or the hellscapes of KIC 12557548 b, Kepler-36c or HD 189773b. In the end, space is too amazing and terrifying to be contained in one list, so I hope some of you reading this will view it as a jumping-off point for your own adventure. At risk of being called corny, I'll close with the following thought: The Ship of the Imagination is all fueled-up. What's on your itinerary?

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