It’s Sol 1 of the Mars 2020 mission on Mars and the very first color pictures are already here! Revealed today, February 19, during a press conference at JPL these images show sneak peeks of the immediate region around Perseverance’s landing site in Jezero Crater, captured by the rover’s hazard avoidance cameras—minus the dirty dust…
Tag: pictures
Jupiter’s Red Spot Dominates New Juno P7 Pics
They’ve arrived! Images from NASA’s Juno spacecraft P7 pass have landed on Earth (a few days early no less) showing Jupiter’s Great Red Spot from the closest distance that it’s ever been imaged before. Captured on the night of July 10 (early July 11 morning UTC) the closest Junocam images were taken from a distance…
Asteroid 2014 JO25 Gets Some Sweet Radar Love
This is our best look yet at asteroid 2014 JO25, which made its closest pass by Earth for at least the next 500 years on April 19, 2017. The animation above is composed of radar observations made from NASA’s Goldstone facility in California when the asteroid was between 1.53 and 1.61 million miles away. These…
NEAR Showed Us a Rocky World of Love
This image of the asteroid Eros—named after the Greek god of love—was captured on March 3, 2000, by NASA’s NEAR Shoemaker spacecraft. It’s actually a mosaic of six separate images acquired from a distance of 127 miles from the 20-mile-wide asteroid, and reveals many large boulders scattered across the surface down to about 160 feet in…
ESO Images NGC 1055, a Spiral Galaxy “On the Edge”
The European Southern Observatory’s unimaginatively-named but incredibly powerful Very Large Telescope (VLT) located on a remote plateau high in the mountains of Chile’s Atacama Desert has captured a detailed view of NGC 1055, a spiral galaxy a little larger than our own located 55 million light-years away. On galactic scales this is relatively close by, and…
This Nebula Really Stinks!
This image from the Hubble Space Telescope shows the Calabash Nebula, the cosmic death throes of a low-mass star like our Sun. Caught during the astronomically brief phase between a red giant and a planetary nebula, the star is ejecting much of its mass out into space at velocities of over 620,000 mph. So why does it “stink?” The bright…
Dawn Sees Landslides and a Central Ridge in a Young Crater on Ceres
Ceres’ Haulani Crater, with a diameter of 21 miles (34 km), shows evidence of landslides from its crater rim. Smooth material and a central ridge stand out on its floor. This image was made using data from NASA’s Dawn spacecraft when it was in its high-altitude mapping orbit, at a distance of 915 miles (1,470…
Mars Rocks!
I don’t care how commonplace images like these have become over the past decade…it still fascinates me to look at photos of the rocky Martian landscape. Rugged, barren and empty as it is, it’s another planet. Every hill, every rock, every sand dune has never been touched by a person, or perhaps even any living…
Lights in the Dark 