Wednesday, Jun 24, 2026

Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute/CICLOPS

Monday, 15 June 2026

Big and Small Before Rings

At first glance, it looks as though Saturn's icy moon Rhea towers over tiny Epimetheus against a breathtaking backdrop of rings and cloud tops. In reality, the two worlds are separated by hundreds of thousands of kilometers, creating a celestial illusion captured by the Cassini spacecraft in 2010.

Credit: NASA Earth Observatory/Michala Garrison

Tuesday, 16 June 2026

A Sea of Spinning Clouds

Over the Southern Ocean surrounding Antarctica, winds can whip around the globe relatively unimpeded by land. Intrepid sailors termed these southern latitudes the Roaring Forties, Furious Fifties, and Screaming Sixties on account of the strong prevailing winds.

When those winds encounter a barrier like an island, the disruption in airflow can be beautiful. One impediment, shown here, is remote Peter I Island. This ice-cloaked volcano lies at 68.86 degrees south latitude in the Bellingshausen Sea, some 400 kilometers off the coast of West Antarctica and more than 1,800 kilometers from Cape Horn, Chile.

On an austral summer day in 2026, the Landsat 8 satellite captured this image of von Kármán vortex streets downwind of the island. These counterrotating spirals form as flowing air is deflected, slows, and spins into eddies.

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS/Thomas Thomopoulos

Wednesday, 17 June 2026

Mira Flores

View of “Mira Flores,” a small erosional outlier on Mars imaged by NASA’s Curiosity rover while driving south toward the Yardang Unit on Mount Sharp, Gale Crater. The butte exposes layered sedimentary bedrock partly covered by wind-blown sand, a small but striking remnant of Mars’ long history of deposition and erosion. (And as Nathalie Cabrol said: Look! A turtle!)

Credit: R. Evans, J. Trauger, H. Hammel, and the HST Comet Science Team and NASA

Thursday, 18 June 2026

Comet Fragment Slams into Jupiter

In July 1994, 21 chunks of comet Shoemaker-Levy 9, which had broken apart a year earlier, slammed into Jupiter. The Hubble telescope recorded this spectacular event.

These images, beginning at the lower right, chronicle the results of one such collision. Hubble began snapping pictures of the impact area just five minutes after the collision. Nothing can be seen. Less than two hours later, a plume of dark debris is visible [bull's-eye pattern, image second from bottom]. Two impact sites are visible in the next picture, taken a few days later. The final snapshot shows three impact sites, the newest near the bull's-eye-shaped region.

This event remains one of the most profound, generation-defining astronomical events ever witnessed, beautifully cataloged by Hubble, revealing the volatile, ever-changing nature of our solar system.

Credit: ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA, A. Scholz, K. Muzic, A. Langeveld, R. Jayawardhana

Friday, 19 June 2026

A Starry View

NASA’s JWST has infrared vision that lets us peer through the dusty veil of the nearby star-forming region NGC 1333. We can see planetary mass objects, newborn stars, and brown dwarfs; some of the faintest ‘stars’ in this mosaic image are in fact newly born free-floating brown dwarfs with masses comparable to those of giant planets. The images were captured as part of a JWST observation program to survey a large portion of NGC 1333. These data constitute the first deep spectroscopic survey of the young cluster.

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