#PPOD: A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying Intuitive Machines’ Nova-C lunar lander lifts off Thursday, Feb. 15, 2024. As part of NASA’s CLPS initiative and Artemis campaign, Intuitive Machines’ first lunar mission will carry science and commercial payloads to the Moon to study plume-surface interactions, space weather/lunar surface interactions, radio astronomy, precision landing technologies, communication/navigation node for future autonomous navigation technologies. Credit: NASA / Kim Shiflett
“Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives.” - Carl Sagan
This image was taken by the Voyager 1 spacecraft on 14 February at Sagan’s suggestion. Voyager was about 6.4 billion kilometers from our tiny dot of a world and heading out of our solar system.
#PPOD: This striking view of Jupiter's Great Red Spot and turbulent southern hemisphere was captured by NASA's Juno spacecraft as it performed a close pass of the gas giant planet. Juno took the three images used to produce this color-enhanced view on Feb. 12, 2019, as the spacecraft performed its 17th science pass of Jupiter. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS @kevinmgill
#PPOD: Pictured here is Saturn's moon Enceladus, its south polar plumes lit by sunlight and its seamed nightside washed with the yellow glow of the light coming from Saturn. Taken by NASA's Cassini spacecraft on 30 November 2010. 🛰🪐 Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / SSI / Gordan Ugarkovic
#PPOD: NASA's Perseverance rover took this picture of the Ingenuity drone perched on a sand dune, its final resting place after 72 amazing flights. Damage to the rotors has grounded the little companion. So long, little friend. You made everyone proud. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU/Jason Major
#PPOD: This high-exposure photograph revealed Earth's atmospheric glow against the backdrop of a starry sky in this image taken from the International Space Station on Jan. 21, 2024. At the time, the orbital lab was 258 miles above the Pacific Ocean northeast of Papua New Guinea. The Nauka science module and Prichal docking module are visible at left. Credit: NASA, ESA/Andreas Mogensen
#PPOD: This exquisite image is from the HiRISE camera onboard NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and shows polar dunes in the southern hemisphere of Mars. When spring comes and temperatures go up, the CO2 ice trapped underneath the sand melts and creates what are known as slope streaks. Sometimes, sublimation will also create jets of CO2 gas. What you see is the result of darker sand surfaces exposed by these processes. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona
This amazing new image is Jupiter's moon Io as taken by the JunoCam onboard NASA's Juno spacecraft on February 3, 2024! The night side can be seen due to reflected light from Jupiter.
#PPOD: NASA's Europa Clipper spacecraft is seen in the main clean room of the Spacecraft Assembly Facility at the agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory on Jan. 19, 2024. The tent around the spacecraft was erected to support electromagnetic testing. Set to launch from Kennedy Space Center in Florida in October, Europa Clipper will arrive at the Jupiter system in 2030 and conduct about 50 flybys of the moon Europa. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
#PPOD: This is neither an impact crater nor a volcano. It is a perfect circular intrusion, about 10km in diameter with a topographic ridge up to 600m high. The Kondyor Massif is located in Eastern Siberia, Russia, north of the city of Khabarovsk. It is a rare form of igneous intrusion called alkaline-ultrabasic massif and it is full of rare minerals. The river flowing out of it forms placer mineral deposits. Credit: NASA/GSFC/METI/ERSDAC/JAROS, and U.S./Japan ASTER Science Team
#PPOD: In this Voyager 1 image of Io, one of Jupiter’s four largest moons, the volcanic plume from the Pele volcano rises 300 kilometers (190 miles) above the surface, and the plume fallout covers an area the size of Alaska. Credit: NASA / JPL / USGS
#PPOD: The Earth is a tilted top, spinning at an angle (about 23 degrees) as it orbits the Sun. Because of this, there are only two times a year when both hemispheres receive light from pole to pole: the equinoctes (the plural of “equinox”). At 05:30 UTC on Sep. 22, 2013—just hours before the actual moment of the equinox—the Russian weather satellite Elektro-L took the photo above, showing our evenly lit planet. Credit: Roscosmos / NTs OMZ / SRC Planeta
#PPOD: Although liquids freeze and evaporate quickly into the thin atmosphere of Mars, persistent winds may make large sand dunes appear to flow and even drip like a liquid. As winds blow from right to left, flowing sand on and around the hills leaves picturesque streaks. The dark arc-shaped droplets of fine sand are called barchans and are the interplanetary cousins of similar Earth-based sand forms. Credit: HiRISE, MRO, LPL (U. Arizona), NASA (via APOD)
#PPOD: The astromaterials curation team at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston has completed the disassembly of the OSIRIS-REx sampler head to reveal the remainder of the asteroid Bennu sample inside. On Jan. 10, they successfully removed two stubborn fasteners that had prevented the final steps of opening the Touch-and-Go-Sample-Acquisition-Mechanism (TAGSAM) head. Pictured here is a top-down view. Credit: NASA/Erika Blumenfeld & Joseph Aebersold
#PPOD: Global color mosaic of Triton, taken in 1989 by Voyager 2 during its flyby of the Neptune system. Triton is the largest of Neptune's 13 moons. It is unusual because it is the only large moon in our solar system that orbits in the opposite direction of its planet's rotation―a retrograde orbit. Scientists think Triton is a Kuiper Belt Object captured by Neptune's gravity millions of years ago. It shares many similarities with Pluto. Credit: NASA/JPL/USGS
#PPOD: Ganges Chasma is one of several deep troughs that make up the Valles Marineris system on Mars. This image shows the geologic contact between the walls of Ganges Chasma and the adjacent plains. The upper slopes of the walls of Ganges have layering that appears dark, rough, and blocky, consistent with lava flows that are thought to make up the plains around Valles Marineris. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UArizona
#PPOD: NASA’s JWST new view of Cassiopeia A (Cas A) in near-infrared light is giving astronomers hints at the dynamical processes occurring within the supernova remnant. Tiny clumps represented in bright pink and orange make up the supernova’s inner shell, and are comprised of sulfur, oxygen, argon, and neon from the star itself. Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, D. Milisavljevic (Purdue University), T. Temim (Princeton University), I. De Looze (University of Gent)
The Earth, from a height of about 18,000 kilometers, on November 9, 1967. The image was taken using an automatic camera mounted in the Apollo Command Module.
#PPOD: Distant boulders and dunes on the surface of Mars as seen from the Viking 1 lander in 1977. On the horizon, a crater rim can be seen. The Viking 1 lander touched down on the western slope of Chryse Planitia (the Plains of Gold) on July 20, 1976. The Viking mission was planned to continue for 90 days after landing, but Viking Lander 1 made its final transmission to Earth on November 11, 1982. Credit: NASA; Image processing: Ted Stryk
#PPOD: NASA's Juno spacecraft captured this close-up of Jupiter's circumpolar cyclone, processed in false color to emphasize small differences. Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / SwRI / MSSS / Navaneeth Krishnan S.
#PPOD: This misshapen orb is Uranus' moon Miranda, which is about 235 km in radius, and was imaged here by Voyager 2, the only spacecraft to ever visit the Uranian system. From this shot, it is pretty obvious that whoever put it together ran out of parts! Incredible little world... Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Kevin M. Gill
#PPOD: Venus's surface as seen by Venera-14, a Soviet space mission launched in 1981. The lander touched down on 5 March 1982 and survived about an hour on the surface, nearly double the planned life. With a temperature of 465 °C and a pressure 94 times as strong as that of Earth, our "twin" planet is not at all hospitable to humans or machines. Credit: Roscosmos; Image processing: Ted Stryk
#PPOD: The JunoCam onboard NASA's Juno spacecraft captured Jupiter’s gorgeous clouds in this image taken on May 29, 2019. Have a lovely weekend! Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS / @kevinmgill
#PPOD: All members of the Pluto system as taken by NASA's New Horizons spacecraft and shown at 1 km/pixel. Pluto and Charon, technically a binary planetary system, anchor this eclectic group, and the small moons are tantalizingly interesting as well. Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute/Ted Stryk