#PPOD: This scene is a mosaic of two Right Mastcam-Z camera images taken by NASA's Perseverance rover on 27 May 2024 at a local time of 3:15 pm. The color approximates natural human vision. Most boulders are largely basaltic, with evidence of being rounded by wind. We can't wait to learn the composition of the lighter-toned one in the middle of the scene, though, as it appears to be something different. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU/Paul Byrne
#PPOD: Some of the incredible solar activity was captured last month by spacecraft near the Sun, including these plasma tornadoes. These walls of plasma are higher than the Earth is in diameter. And, of course, all this solar activity has provided us with stunning aurorae. With solar maximum approaching, chances are high that we'll see more incredible views like this one! Credit: NASA
#PPOD: To end our week, we look back at this beautiful picture of Titan and Saturn taken by NASA's Cassini spacecraft on May 22, 2015. Processed using calibrated near-infrared (MT2, CB2) filtered images. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SSI/CICLOPS/Kevin M. Gill
#PPOD: The shadow is not that of Europa but a second moon (Io), which is not in this frame. Europa is slightly smaller than Earth's Moon and is tidally locked. Jupiter's Great Red Spot (GRS) is a vast cyclonic storm system about three times the size of Earth when Voyager flew by. Since 1979, the GRS has continuously shrunk, slowly changing its shape from an oval to a circle. It is now a little over the size of the Earth only. Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / Kevin M. Gill
#PPOD: Korolev is an ice-filled impact crater in the Mare Boreum quadrangle of Mars, located at 73° north latitude and 165° east longitude. The crater is 81.4 kilometers in diameter and contains about 2,200 cubic kilometers of water ice, comparable in volume to Great Bear Lake in northern Canada. Taken by the HRSC onboard ESA's Mars Express spacecraft. Credit: ESA/DLR/FUBerlin/AndreaLuck
#PPOD: Orbiting 400 kilometers above Quebec, Canada, planet Earth, the International Space Station Expedition 59 crew captured this snapshot of the broad St. Lawrence River and curiously circular Lake Manicouagan on April 11, 2019. Right of center, the ring-shaped lake is a modern reservoir within the eroded remnant of an ancient 100-kilometer diameter impact crater. Credit: NASA, International Space Station Expedition 59
#PPOD: Technicians offload NASA’s largest planetary mission spacecraft, Europa Clipper, from a U.S. Air Force C-17 Globemaster III transport aircraft at the Launch and Landing Facility at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida on May 23. NASA and SpaceX are targeting launch aboard a Falcon Heavy rocket from Launch Complex 39A at Kennedy later this year. The launch period opens on Oct. 10. Credit: NASA/Isaac Watson
#PPOD: A massive storm, large enough to encompass most of North America, was spotted in Jupiter’s northern latitudes by NASA's Juno spacecraft on May 12. Juno is currently in its first extended mission and recently wrapped up close flybys of the Galilean moons Ganymede, Europa, and Io. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/ @kevinmgill
#PPOD: Enjoy this aesthetically stunning picture and consider the latitude at which it was captured. This is Portonovo (45N), a small town near Mount Conero in the province of Ancona in Italy. (We had it pretty good in San Francisco - 37N with purple and green). This low latitude tells you the strength of that solar storm that just hit. In fact, aurorae were observed in the Caribbean! Before May 12, only the Carrington Event reached those latitudes. Credit: Michele Elisei
#PPOD: Mimas drifts along in its orbit against the azure backdrop of Saturn's northern latitudes in this true-color view. The long, dark lines on the atmosphere are shadows cast by the planet's rings. At the bottom, craters on icy Mimas (398 kilometers) give the moon a dimpled appearance. Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute/CICLOPS
#PPOD: This stunning photo was taken by the High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) onboard the ESA's Mars Express spacecraft. Phobos is the larger and closer of Mars's two moons, the other being Deimos. One hypothesis of their origin involves the possible capture of primitive asteroids. Unfortunately, Phobos is being pulled apart and closer by Mars's tidal forces and gravity. Credit: ESA/DLR/FUBerlin/ @andrealuck CC BY (https://www.flickr.com/photos/192271236@N03/53635851891/)
#PPOD: ESA's ExoMars orbiter caught a close-up view of a huge crater on Mars. This remnant of an ancient impact is just one of the many scars asteroids have inflicted upon the Red Planet. Water, volcanoes, and impacts from asteroids shaped the Martian surface in the ancient past, but the preservation of this impact is remarkable. The crater is located in Utopia Planitia and is about 8 km in diameter. Credit: ESA/TGO/CaSSIS
#PPOD: This photo was taken by NASA's Bill Dunford near Malad City, Idaho, on May 11, 2024; the International Space Station appears as a white streak in this 8-second exposure. Credit: NASA/Bill Dunford
#PPOD: M51 (NGC 5194) lies about 27 million light-years away from Earth in the constellation Canes Venatici and is trapped in a tumultuous relationship with its near neighbor, the dwarf galaxy NGC 5195. The interaction between these two galaxies has made these galactic neighbors one of the better-studied galaxy pairs in the night sky. Credit: ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA, A. Adamo (Stockholm University) and the FEAST JWST team
#PPOD: As carbon dioxide frost sublimates with the warming Martian spring, a pattern emerges of dark brown sand dunes interspersed with the remaining bright frost. Image taken by the HiRISE camera onboard NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / University of Arizona
#PPOD: This Hubble Space Telescope image shows boulders ejected from the asteroid Dimorphos after the DART spacecraft slammed into it in September 2022. The bright object with a tail is Dimorphos, and the tiny white dots clustered around it are boulders ranging in size from 1 to 6.7 meters (3 to 22 feet) in diameter. Credit: NASA, ESA, D. Jewitt (UCLA)
#PPOD: NASA's Voyager 1 probe launched in 1977 and is now the most distant human-made object from Earth, traveling through interstellar space. Recently, NASA engineers had to figure out why the probe was suddenly sending unreadable data. After nearly six months of analysis and re-programming, they got Voyager correctly transmitting again. Truly a feat of human ingenuity. Credit: Dave Granlund
#PPOD: This is how NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft saw Neptune, the other blue planet, in true color on 17 August 1989, based on a re-analysis of the original data by Patrick G J Irwin et al 2024. Credit: NASA/Voyager 2/PDS/OPUS/Ardenau4
#PPOD: In dark evening skies over June Lake, northern hemisphere, planet Earth, Comet 12P/Pons-Brooks stood just above the western horizon on March 30. Its twisted turbulent ion tail and diffuse greenish coma are captured in this two-degree wide telescopic field of view along with the bright yellowish star Hamal also known as Alpha Arietis. Credit: Dan Bartlett via APOD
#PPOD: The JunoCam instrument on NASA’s Juno captured this view of Jupiter’s moon Io — with the first-ever image of its south polar region — during the spacecraft’s 60th flyby of Jupiter on April 9, 2024, revealing mountains and lava lakes. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS; Image processing: Gerald Eichstädt/Thomas Thomopoulos
#PPOD: This photograph was taken by astronaut Alex Gerst on September 8, 2014, from the International Space Station. The ISS was over Libya at the time, and Gerst was looking south-southwest over a storm that stretched hundreds of kilometers across the sand seas of the Sahara. In the photo, winds appear to be coming out of the east or northeast (left), and the sun is setting to the west (right in this image). Credit: NASA/ESA/A. Gerst
Some mind-boggling details of a Martian impact crater taken by NASA's HiRISE camera onboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. This image has everything: layers, boulders, dunes, and maybe some polygonal terrain, too. The blue filter is used here to learn about morphologies, textures, and composition.
#PPOD: This artist's concept illustrates Kepler-16b, the first planet known to definitively orbit two stars -- what's called a circumbinary planet. The planet, which can be seen in the foreground, was discovered by NASA's Kepler mission. The two orbiting stars regularly eclipse each other, as seen from our point of view on Earth. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/T. Pyle
#PPOD: Rising from turbulent waves of dust and gas is the Horsehead Nebula, Barnard 33, which resides roughly 1,300 light-years away, and the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope has captured the sharpest infrared images to date. Webb’s new view focuses on the illuminated edge of the top of the nebula’s distinctive dust and gas structure. Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, K. Misselt (University of Arizona) and A. Abergel (IAS/University Paris-Saclay, CNRS)
#PPOD: View of the north polar region of Jupiter's moon Io, in approximate natural color, made from images captured with NASA's Galileo spacecraft on March 28, 1998. The background is filled with Jupiter's clouds. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ Galileo Imaging Team/Jason Major