Planetary Picture of the Day - Week of October 6, 2025

Monday, 6 October 2025

Triton

NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft captured dark streaks produced by geysers visible on the icy surface of Triton's south polar region during its flyby on August 25, 1989.

Tuesday, 7 October 2025

Martian Morning

NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover used its black-and-white navigation cameras to capture panoramas at two times of day on April 8, 2023. The panoramas were captured at 9:20 a.m. and 3:40 p.m. local Mars time, then merged together. Color was added for an artistic interpretation of the scene, with blue representing the morning panorama and yellow representing the afternoon one.

At the bottom right of the postcard is Curiosity. The rover’s three antennas and nuclear power source are visible. Trailing behind Curiosity are rover tracks, and beyond those is "Marker Band Valley," a winding region where the rover discovered unexpected signs of an ancient lake. Further below are two hills – "Bolivar" and “Deepdale” – that Curiosity drove between while exploring "Paraitepuy Pass."

Wednesday, 8 October 2025

Barred Spiral Galaxy NGC 1512

In this view of the center of the magnificent barred spiral galaxy NGC 1512, the NASA Hubble Space Telescope's broad spectral vision reveals the galaxy at all wavelengths from ultraviolet to infrared. The colors (which indicate differences in light intensity) map where newly born star clusters exist in both "dusty" and "clean" regions of the galaxy.

This color-composite image was created from seven images taken with three different Hubble cameras: the Faint Object Camera (FOC), the Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2), and the Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer (NICMOS).

NGC 1512 is a barred spiral galaxy in the southern constellation of Horologium. Located 30 million light-years away, relatively "nearby" as galaxies go, it is bright enough to be seen with amateur telescopes. The galaxy spans 70,000 light-years, nearly as much as our own Milky Way galaxy.

The galaxy's core is unique for its stunning 2,400 light-year-wide circle of infant star clusters, called a "circumnuclear" starburst ring. Starbursts are episodes of vigorous formation of new stars and are found in a variety of galaxy environments.

Thursday, 9 October 2025

Features on Asteroid Donaldjohanson

The official names of asteroid 52246 Donaldjohanson’s surface features — as identified by the Southwest Research Institute-led Lucy Mission — have been approved by the International Astronomical Union (IAU). Latitude and longitude lines and arrows indicate the names of various features on the surface, which are named after significant paleoanthropological sites and discoveries. The NASA Lucy spacecraft flew past the asteroid on April 20, 2025.