Planetary Exploration Imagery

Digital illustrations and photographs of Mars and its features. Includes weather patterns and topographical maps showcasing the planet's surface.

Photo Mosaic of Mars Weather From Orbit, Mars Global Surveyor
Photo Mosaic of Mars Weather From Orbit, Mars Global Surveyor
122 assets in this story
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Retina damage from diabetes, illustration
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Fish-eye View of Titan's Surface
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Hot eruption sites scattered across Jupiter's moon Io stand out dramatically in an infrared image taken Oct. 13, 2001, by NASA's Galileo spacecraft as it sped past this most volcanically active of all known worlds.
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Mercury in Color!
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If the Moon were a perfectly smooth sphere of uniform density, the gravity map would be a single, featureless color, indicating that the force of gravity at a given elevation was the same everywhere. But like other rocky bodies in the solar system, including Earth, the Moon has both a bumpy surface and a lumpy interior. Spacecraft in orbit around the Moon experience slight variations in gravity caused by both of these irregularities. The free-air gravity map shows deviations from the mean, the gravity that a cueball Moon would have. The deviations are measured in milliGals, a unit of acceleration. On the map, dark purple is at the low end of the range, at around -400 mGals, and red is at the high end near +400 mGals. Yellow denotes the mean. These views show a part of the Moon's surface that's never visible from Earth. They are centered on lunar coordinates 29°N 142°E. The large, multi-ringed impact feature near the center is Mare Moscoviense. The crater Mendeleev is south of this. The
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The First Solar Day
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Healthy retina, illustration
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This is one artist's concept of Kuiper Belt object 2014 MU69, the next flyby target for NASA's New Horizons mission. This binary concept is based on telescope observations made at Patagonia, Argentina, on July 17, 2017, when MU69 passed in front of a star. New Horizons scientists theorize that it could be a single body with a large chunk taken out of it, or two bodies that are close together or even touching.
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The hemispheric view of Venus, as revealed by more than a decade of radar investigations culminating in NASA's 1990-1994 Magellan mission, is centered at 0 degrees east longitude.
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Absorption of solar energy heats up our planet's surface and atmosphere making life for us possible. But the energy carnot stay bound up in the Earth's environment forever. If it did, the Earth would be as hot as the sun. Instead, as the surface and atmosphere warm, they emit thermal long wave radiation, some of which escapes into space and allows the Earth to cool. This false color image of the Earth was produced by the Clouds and the Earth's Radiant Energy System (CERES) instrument flying aboard NASA's Terra spacecraft. The image shows where more or less heat, in the form of long-wave radiation, is emanating from the top of the Earth's atmosphere. As one can see in the image, the thermal radiation leaving the oceans is fairly uniform. The blue swaths represent thick clouds, the tops of which are so high they are among the coldest places on Earth. In the American Southwest, which can be seen in the upper right hand corner of the globe, there is often little cloud cover to block outgoi
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This hemispheric view of Venus, as revealed by more than a decade of radar investigations culminating in the 1990-1994 Magellan mission, is centered on the North Pole. NASA's Magellan spacecraft imaged more than 98% of Venus.
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This artist's concept shows the internal structure of the giant asteroid Vesta, based on data from NASA's Dawn mission; the innermost core in brown, the mantle in green and the crust in gray.
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Global Coverage
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Phoenix Landing Site Indicated on Global View
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Digitally rendered planet mars isolated on white
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Series of the super blood moon on January 20, 2019 in the western hemisphere
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Range 147,000 km. ( 91,000 mi. ) Resolution 2.7 km. ( 1.7 mi. ) P-29524C this Voyager 2 color image of the Uranian satellite, Miranda is a composite of three shots taken through green, violet, and ultraviolet filters from the narrow angle camera. It is the best color image of Miranda returned to date. Miranda, just 480 km. (300 mi.) across, is the smallest of Uranus' five major satellites. Miranda's regional geologic provinces show very well in this view of the southern hemisphere. The dark and bright banded region, with its curvilinear traces, covers about half of the image. Higher resolution pictures taken later show many fault lines valleys and ridges parallel to these bands. Near the terminator (at right), another system of ridges and valleys abuts the banded terrain, while many impact craters pockmark the surface in this region. The largest of these are about 30 km. (20 mi.) in diameter. Many more lie in the range of 5 to 10 km. (3 to 6 mi.) in diameter
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Digital Illustration of Venus' Rotation
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Artwork of three asteroids.
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This montage shows the best views of Jupiter's four large and diverse Galilean satellites as seen by the Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) on the New Horizons spacecraft during its flyby of Jupiter in late February 2007. The four moons are, from left to right: Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto. The images have been scaled to represent true relative sizes of the four moons and are arranged in their order from Jupiter. Io, 2,260 miles in diameter, is notable for its active volcanism, which
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3D Globe North Pole Globe model with detailed topography without water. North Pole. 3d rendering isolated on white background. Elements of this image furnished by NASA Copyright: xZoonar.com/JacekxFulawkax 10232703
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This is a polar stereographic map of gravity of the north polar region of the moon from the Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) mission. The map displays the region from latitude 60 north to the pole.