Description This graphic illustrates the areas of Jupiter’s moon Io sampled by the Microwave Radiometer (MWR) instrument aboard NASA’s Juno spacecraft during two close flybys. The black overlapping lines show the instrument’s footprints during Perijove 57 on Dec. 30, 2023, when the spacecraft primarily mapped the northern hemisphere. The blue lines represent Perijove 58 on […]
Category: Photojournal
NASA’s Juno Peers Beneath Io’s Surface
Description This map represents data captured by the Microwave Radiometer (MWR) aboard NASA’s Juno spacecraft, indicating heat rising from just beneath the surface of Jupiter’s moon Io. While infrared instruments measure the temperature of the moon’s surface, the lowest frequency microwave channels (0.6 and 1.25 gigahertz) on the MWR can penetrate between about 6 and […]
NISAR’s L-Band Radar Reveals ‘Hummingbird’ in Antarctica
Description Data from the Earth-orbiting U.S.-India NISAR (NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar) satellite’s L-band radar was used to produce an image of Nunatak Zaterjavshijsja — a mountaintop in East Antarctica — poking out amid a stream of ice flowing northeast to the ocean. The obstruction causes stresses in the ice, heavily fracturing the surrounding surfaces with […]
NASA’s Psyche Mission Images Details of Martian Surface During Flyby
Description Captured by the multispectral imager instrument on NASA’s Psyche mission, this is an enhanced-color mosaic created from four individual images acquired on May 15, 2026, during the spacecraft’s flyby of Mars. Psyche was traveling from right to left (northeast to southwest on Mars) during the six minutes that it took to acquire the images for […]
Curiosity Finds Evidence of an Ancient Sandstorm
Description Billions of years ago, an hours-long Martian sandstorm blew so intensely that sand ripples began to climb upon one another as they moved across the surface. These layers of sediment eventually hardened into the multilayered rocks seen in this image, which was taken by NASA’s Curiosity rover on Dec. 12, 2024, the 4,391st Martian […]
Perseverance’s Trip to ‘Broom Point’
Description This orbital map shows the path NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover took to get to a location the science team has dubbed the “Broom Point member,” a sequence of layered bedrock likely more than 3.9 billion years old. As planned, the rover landed inside Jezero Crater on Feb. 18, 2021. It investigated the crater’s western delta […]
NASA’s HiRISE Captures Perseverance Marking a Milestone on Mars
Description NASA’s Perseverance rover appears as a green speck on the Martian surface on June 13, 2026, a day before the robotic explorer marked a distance milestone, having traveled a full marathon (26.2 miles, or 42.195 kilometers) on the Red Planet. Perseverance reached that distance after five years and four months of driving — on […]
Astronaut Jessica Meir Assists With Hardware Updates for NASA’s Cold Atom Lab
Description NASA astronaut Jessica Meir inspects optical fibers while installing hardware updates to the agency’s Cold Atom Lab, or CAL, aboard the International Space Station on May 8, 2026. About the size of a minifridge and operated from Earth, CAL chills atoms to temperatures below minus 459 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 273.15 degrees Celsius), so close […]
NASA’s INCUS Satellites Progress Toward Launch
Description One of the three satellites that make up NASA’s INCUS (Investigation of Convective Updrafts) mission sits on a fixture at the facilities of Blue Canyon Technologies in Lafayette, Colorado. The satellite completed testing in preparation for launch in late May 2026. The mission will make the first space-based survey of the dynamics of tropical […]
International Sea Level Satellite Observes El Niño Precursor
Description Sea level height data from the international Sentinel-6 Michael Freilich satellite collected from March to May 2026 show higher, warmer water moving from the western Pacific Ocean to just off the coast of Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru. This phenomenon is known as a warm Kelvin wave, signified in this animation of the data by […]