Monday, August 21, 2023

Dimorphos and Boulders
This image from the Hubble Space Telescope shows boulders that were 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 in diameter.

Tuesday, August 22, 2023

Winter Wonderland
This sweeping view along a rusty red ridge and into a crater showcases the exquisite beauty of icy, layered terrain in the south polar region on Mars.

The High Resolution Stereo Imaging camera onboard ESA’s Mars Express captured this frosty scene in the Ultimi Scopuli region near the south pole of Mars on 19 May 2022. At this time it was southern hemisphere spring and ice was starting to retreat. Dark dunes began to peak through the frost and elevated terrain appears ice-free.

Wednesday, August 23, 2023

Phobos
This closeup of Mars' moon Phobos was captured 25 years ago with the Mars Orbiter Camera on NASA's Mars Global Surveyor on August 19, 1998, from a distance of 1,080 kilometers. Phobos is the larger of the two Mars moons, measuring only about 20 km across. The tiny moon orbits so close to the red planet that Mars' gravity should rip Phobos apart in another 50 million years.

Thursday, August 24, 2023

Spiral Beauty
This is NGC 4569, aka Messier 90, an intermediate spiral galaxy located 60 million light-years away in the constellation Virgo. The image is a color-composite from images captured with Hubble's WFC3 instrument on Dec. 12, 2019.

Friday, August 25, 2023

ISRO Lunar Mission Success!
This image, captured by the Landing Imager Camera onboard the Indian Space Research Organisation's (ISRO) Chandrayaan-3 lander, shows the lunar surface after the craft successfully touched down on the Moon. The photo also shows one leg of the lander and its accompanying shadow.