The Curiosity Rover Takes A Selfie On Mars
In 2012, the Curiosity Rover touched down on the surface of Mars, after a perilous journey on what NASA dubbed a skycrane . And ever since, its been hard at work, investigating Mars for signs of life and probing its geologic history.
The above picture is a selfie taken by the rover in 2015. In its time on Mars, Curiosity has confirmed that the planet used to be home to flowing water, with rivers and lakes, and had a past where the planet could have been hospitable to life.
In July 2020, NASA will launch the Mars 2020 rover a vehicle similar to Curiosity to an ancient dried-up river delta on the Martian surface, looking for more clues to piece together the natural history of the red planet.
My Favourite Image Of The Solar System
Of the many thousands of images that have been taken so far, one my favourites is a picture of Mars taken by the Curiosity Rover.
The image displays Gale Crater on the Martian surface around 1.5m wide by 1m deep.
The colours are vivid orange, dark grey and white, and there is a wide range of textures indicating the varied Martian surface.
The reason this image has captured my imagination is because it truly feels as if we are looking through a window onto the surface of Mars.
The cameras that took the pictures sit at around eye height on Curiosity, so the image really conveys what it would be like to stand on Mars and view the scene.
The scientific data has been given a new lease of life through painstaking processing, adapting the raw data to the colour palette of the human eye.
Many hundreds of raw images have been amalgamated into one photograph to achieve a high resolution and pin sharp focus.
Its an image that I feel that I can step into, transporting me to Mars in an instant.
To my mind this is the real power of this image.
The raw scientific data has given us amazing scientific insight into the bodies that we have been observing, but with the alchemy of art the same data is producing a visible, visceral delight which is available to all.
What’s more, the raw data is available for anyone to download and process and produce their own images of the Solar System.
Find out how to do this in our guide to processing raw space mission data.
A Solar System Is Born
In 2014, the radio ALMA observatory in Chile captured this image of a star 450 light years away. The star is at the center of the image, but surrounding it are rings of material left over from the birth of the star. .
Looking at the image, astronomers have found evidence that planets are forming out of the material in those rings. This is the beginning of an entire solar system, perhaps one not so different than ours. When we look at the birth of this solar system, were looking at a process that likely birthed our own.
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The Rosetta Mission Delivered A Serene Portrait Of A Comet
The European Space Agencys Rosetta mission was the first ever to actually land a probe onto the surface of a comet. The mission launched in 2004, and arrived at the comet in 2014.
The comet, named 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, is a little more than 2.5 miles wide. Its amazing that we could navigate to something so small in the vastness of space. The above image, captured in 2015, shows the comet in stunning detail.
Perhaps even more exciting is this close-up timelapse of the surface of the comet. Its almost cinematic. In the foreground, dust and cosmic rays look like a snowstorm. And you can clearly see the craggy features of the comet. It makes it easier to imagine what its like to ride on a comet.
James Webb Telescope Can Take Detailed Photos Of Our Own Solar System’s Planets And Moons
Over the past few days, NASA has released stunning photos of nebulae, groups of galaxies and even the “deepest” view of the universe taken by the James Webb Space Telescope. Now, the agency has released images of something much closer to home that everyone’s new favorite telescope sorry, Hubble! has captured. When the James Webb team was calibrating the instrument, members took photos of Jupiter to see if it can be used to observe nearby celestial objects like moons and asteroids, as well other elements like planet rings and satellites. The answer, it turns out, is yes.
A photo taken by the telescope’s Near-Infrared Camera instruments short-wavelength filter clearly shows the gas giant’s distinct bands and its moon Europa. The Great Red Spot is also perfectly visible, even though it looks white due to the way the image was processed. When the NIRCam instrument’s 2.12 micron filter was used, the resulting image showed the Jovian moons Europa, Thebe, Metis and even Europa’s shadow near the Great Red Spot. And when the team used NIRCam’s 3.23 micron filter, the resulting image captured some of Jupiter’s rings, as you can see below:
Bryan Holler, one of the scientists who helped plan these observations, said:
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The Solar Eclipse Inspired Millions To Stop And Look At Our Star The Sun
When people write the history of the past decade in the United States, theyll mention all the moments of division, the conflict, and the bleak status of our polarized politics. I hope they also include a bit about the one moment nearly all Americans were unified.
On August 21, 2017, 88 percent of Americans 216 million people took time to witness a solar eclipse that bisected the continental United States. It was a stunning moment, when millions of us were awestruck by the same rare phenomenon.
The above photo of the eclipse was taken in Chester, Illinois. But a similar view could be found anywhere along the eclipses path between Oregon and South Carolina.
Here Are Hubbles 2021 Photos Of The Outer Solar System
If we had to rely solely on spacecraft to learn about the outer planets, we wouldnt be making great progress. It takes a massive effort to get a spacecraft to the outer Solar System. But thanks to the Hubble Space Telescope, we can keep tabs on the gas giants without leaving Earths orbit.
NASAs Outer Planet Atmospheres Legacy program keeps an eye on the outer planets to monitor changes in their atmospheres. Changes on Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune take place on timescales of years and decadesor longerso Hubble checks in yearly to see how the gas/ice giants are doing. It gives scientists a long baseline of data. Each year OPAL captures images of the outer planets, and OPAL is slated to continue until either Hubble itself is no longer operational, or until Hubbles WFC3/UVIS camera is no longer functioning.
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Cassinis Last Look At Saturn Reminds Us Why We Need To Go Back
NASAs Cassini mission ended in a fiery finale in 2017 when the spacecraft dove into Saturn after more than a decade in its orbit. These are the last series of images Cassini seen before its demise. In the timelapse, you see the icy moon Enceladus setting behind Saturn.
Its a picture that represents so much.
Many years earlier, Cassini discovered that Enceladus has a remarkable feature: Plumes of water vapor and gas shoot out of cracks in the surface. That water means theres a liquid ocean beneath the ice-covered surface, which may have geothermal vents like those found at the bottom of our oceans.
The discovery was immense: It shot Enceladus to the top of the list of places where we could possibly find life in our solar system. It could be the site of a second genesis where life formed, evolved, and prospered undisturbed on another world. If even a few small microbes were found in its waters, it would be one of the greatest scientific findings of all time.
This image above says farewell to Enceladus, but it also beckons we must, someday, go back to see if theres life there.
Hubbles Extreme Deep Field Reminds Us How Impossibly Large The Universe Is
Everywhere in the universe we look, there are vast discoveries to be found.
The above image is the Hubble space telescopes eXtreme Deep Field observation, published in 2012. The image is the result of combining 1,000 exposures of a teeny tiny patch of sky taken over 10 years. The image contains 5,500 galaxies found in a portion of the night sky thats smaller than one-tenth the width of the moon. As the Hubble website explains, this is just a 30 millionth of the whole sky. So in every thumbnail-sized area of the sky, theres untold numbers of galaxies, stars, planets, and possibly life. Its mind boggling, and awesome.
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What Its Like On The Surface Of Pluto
Heres another image from the New Horizons mission, and my favorite. Its a close-up view of Plutos surface captured just 15 minutes after New Horizons closest approach to the planet. It shows 11,000 foot tall mountains and icy planes, and you can even see tiny wisps of Plutos extremely thin atmosphere in arch-shaped lines above the surface.
The preceding photo shows what Pluto looks like this one helps us understand what it would be like to be there, on the surface. Pluto may be a dwarf planet, but its an entire world.
Scientists Unveil First Ever Pictures Of Multiple Planets Around A Sunlike Star
The two giant worlds, each much larger than Jupiter, constitute only the third multiplanet system ever imaged
For the first time ever, scientists have managed to capture images of multiple planets twirling about another sunlike star. Yet despite its stellar hosts resemblance to our own, the snapshots of this planetary system reveal it to be no place like home.
Named TYC 8998-760-1 and located about 300 light-years from Earth in the constellation Musca, the star is similar in mass to the sun. Its two known planets, however, are distinctly alienorbiting their star at about 160 and 320 times the Earth-sun distance, respectively . Both worlds are supersized, compared with anything in our solar system. The outermost planet is some six times heavier than Jupiter, and the inner one tips the scales at 14 times Jupiters mass. Each of the worlds appears as a small dot around the star in images produced by the Spectro-Polarimetric High-contrast Exoplanet Research instrument, or SPHERE, which operates on the European Southern Observatorys Very Large Telescope in northern Chile. The findings are detailed in a study published on July 22 in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.
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Stars Orbiting The Black Hole In The Center Of Our Galaxy
The image of M87 shows what a black holes event horizon looks like. This GIF is a testament to the amazing power of black holes.
This is a timelapse of 20 years of observations from the European Southern Observatorys Very Large Telescope looking at stars in orbit around the black hole at the center of our own galaxy, called Sagittarius A*. And yes, the stars some more massive than our sun orbit the black hole, like our planet orbits the sun.
One of the stars in this array, called S2, recently passed by the black hole at a speed greater than 15.5 million miles per hour. Thats more than 4,300 miles every second, or nearly three percent of the speed of light. Scientists recently used this observation in a test that, once again, proves Albert Einsteins theory of gravity is correct.
And heres a cleaner, illustrated version of similar observations. The orbital path of the star S2 is outlined in yellow.
Nasas Webb Takes Its First
Editors Note: This post highlights images from Webb science in progress, which has not yet been through the peer-review process.
For the first time, astronomers have used NASAs James Webb Space Telescope to take a direct image of a planet outside our solar system. The exoplanet is a gas giant, meaning it has no rocky surface and could not be habitable.
The image, as seen through four different light filters, shows how Webbs powerful infrared gaze can easily capture worlds beyond our solar system, pointing the way to future observations that will reveal more information than ever before about exoplanets.
This is a transformative moment, not only for Webb but also for astronomy generally, said Sasha Hinkley, associate professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom, who led these observations with a large international collaboration. Webb is an international mission led by NASA in collaboration with its partners, ESA and CSA .
The exoplanet in Webbs image, called HIP 65426 b, is about six to 12 times the mass of Jupiter, and these observations could help narrow that down even further. It is young as planets go about 15 to 20 million years old, compared to our 4.5-billion-year-old Earth.
Researchers have been analyzing the data from these observations and are preparing a paper they will submit to journals for peer review. But Webbs first capture of an exoplanet already hints at future possibilities for studying distant worlds.
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This Is The Very First Image Of A Black Hole
In April 2019, an international collaboration of scientists called the Event Horizon Telescope told the world that, for the first time, humanity has peered into the edge of a black hole.
The supermassive black hole is at the center of the Messier 87 galaxy, 53.49 million light-years away. The black hole, called M87,is massive, some 6.5 billion times the mass of our sun, all contained in a single point of infinite density.
In the image, the visible reddish and white light surrounding the black hole is material being destroyed by its immense gravity. That light encircles the photon orbit, a region beyond which light could conceivably escape from but is unlikely to. Within that photon orbit is the event horizon, the region beyond which no light can escape.
As you look at this image, know that this isnt an object. This is a shadow, a sink. The light in the center gets sucked out of our view irretrievably. The absence in the image means something has left our observable universe. Its a truly remarkable moment for humans to be able to see something so enigmatic, so far away, and so incredibly difficult to capture.
Run The Solar System In 20 Km
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Launching rockets into space may be our regular business, but on 9 October Space Team Europe is at a very different kind of start line: at the space-themed Paris 20 km running event. Nearly 150 colleagues from ESA, CNES, ArianeGroup and Arianespace are uniting forces to highlight the power of collaboration, taking part in either the in-person event or the virtual experience in their home towns across Europe. Ambitions are high to complete the 20 km race, but Sundays Space Team Europe represents a much larger and diverse community driven by the same vision and ambition for excellence to excel as a world-leading and inspiring space agency.
Whether youre taking part in the event yourself, participating virtually, planning your own 20 km run this weekend, or cheering from the sidelines, this graphic imagines the route through Paris as a scaled tour through the Solar System. Full sight-seeing tour details below!
The Solar System in 20 kmGO! Were starting our journey at the centre of our Solar System with the Sun let the power of the solar wind accelerate you off the start line! Our ESA-led Solar Orbiter mission is monitoring our nearest star and the influence of space weather on our home planet Earth.
Dont forget to hydrate as we pass by Jupiter at 3.5 km. ESAs Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer is launching next year to probe the oceans of the planets icy moons and investigate their habitability potential.
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Solar System Images Have The Power To Transport Us To Other Worlds
Dramatic imagery captured by probes and rovers exploring our Solar System lets us travel to space without leaving Earth.
From as far back as I can remember I have been fascinated by space and have always wanted to get out there.
It started with the Clangers, was reinforced by Star Trek and drove me into a career in space science.
My dream presently remains unfulfilled, but in recent years I feel that I have got closer to my goal through some of the fantastic images that have been taken of the planets in our Solar System.
On 4 October 1957, the Soviets launched the first artificial satellite – Sputnik I – into Earth orbit, kick-starting what would eventually become known as the Space Race.
Not long after, on 14 August 1959, the first Earth observation picture was taken from orbit.
It is blurry to say the least: a crude picture of the sunlit part of the Pacific Ocean and its cloud cover, taken by NASAs Explorer 6 spacecraft.
Since then we have been taking more and more detailed images of our planet and the other worlds out there.
The magnificent and unexpected ice mountains of Pluto were revealed in 2015 via images taken by the New Horizons flyby mission.
In 2014, the excitement of the Rosetta mission’s Philae touchdown was marked by images taken in orbit around the comet and from its chaotic surface.
So much of our Solar System has been revealed by stunning images.
