Wednesday, Jul 22, 2026

Credit: ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO)/Benisty et al.

Monday, 13 July 2026

The Birth of a Moon

This image is quite extraordinary, and it's not the big disk that's attracting the most attention. Although the large planet-forming disk around the star PDS 70 is clearly imaged and quite interesting in its own right. It's also not the planet on the right, just inside the big disk, that's being talked about the most. Although the planet PDS 70c is newly formed and, interestingly, similar in size and mass to Jupiter, it's the fuzzy patch around it that's causing the commotion. That fuzzy patch is thought to be itself a dusty disk that is now forming into moons -- and that has never been seen before.

Credit: NASA / JPL / SwRI / MSSS / Gerald Eichstädt / John Rogers

Tuesday, 14 July 2026

Charting the Vast Jovian Realm

NASA's Juno mission provides new maps of the giant planet Jupiter. This is a cylindrical composite map from Juno's 9th close pass by Jupiter. Juno is in a highly elliptical, near-polar orbit, so on each orbit JunoCam takes well-resolved images within just a few hours around closest approach, which is called perijove (PJ). As Juno is moving very rapidly at that time, the camera scans a 58-degree-wide field of view in narrow red, green, and blue strips, and a single image is assembled from a long sequence of these strips taken during one rotation of the spacecraft at 2 rpm. The movement between successive strips makes it essential to reproject them to produce a single image; then, to compensate for distortions caused by movement and perspective, and to combine multiple images and put them in context, it is essential to reproject the images into maps.

Credit: NASA/Mike Guinto

Wednesday, 15 July 2026

Testing DAVINCI on Earth

Before NASA sends its DAVINCI (Deep Atmosphere Venus Investigation of Noble gases, Chemistry, and Imaging) descent probe down through Venus’s thick atmosphere, scientists need to confirm that its cameras and instruments can do the job. During its 60-minute descent at Venus, the probe will capture images, measure the atmospheric chemistry, and explore the environment of a world no one has seen up close in this way.

To prepare, a team of DAVINCI scientists and engineers traveled to Crater Island, Utah, in late June. There, they simulated the descent imaging phase of their Venus mission through slow, near-vertical helicopter descents from altitudes as high as 18,000 feet to ensure they could measure the landscape using only optical and infrared images taken on the way down.

Credit: NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University

Thursday, 16 July 2026

A Picture-Perfect Volcano

As of June 23, 2026, NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) has spent an incredible 17 years orbiting the Moon, and the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC) has been hard at work ever since.

This lunar volcano is so ideally shaped and is evidence of ancient explosive eruptions of highly silicic magmas in the Moon’s distant past. There are multiple areas on the Moon where explosive eruptions have occurred, but none is as picture-perfect as this one! This volcano is 0.6 km high and about 7 km wide at its base.

For this image, the spacecraft was rolled so that the cameras would view it from the side to better show its shape (rather than looking straight down at it from orbit).

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona

Friday, 17 July 2026

Get into the (Flood) Groove

Taken on 26 May 2026 by the HiRISE camera onboard NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, this observation within the Kasei Valles outflow channel shows a distinct flood-eroded surface marked by a series of linear ridges and grooves, which are also present on an infilled impact crater. What exactly are these ridges/grooves, how did they form, and what is their relation to nearby fans? (Note: The image is about 5 kilometers across.)

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