Spacecraft and Celestial Bodies

Artistic concepts illustrating NASA spacecraft in space, exploring brown dwarfs, Saturn, and the heliosphere's outer layers.

A New View of Saturn - Black and White

How Warm is Mars

This image shows comet Tempel 1 six minutes before it ran over NASA's Deep Impact probe at 10:52 a.m. Pacific time, July 3 (1:52 a.m. Eastern time, July 4), 2005.

Calcium was detected in the near-Mercury exosphere by NASA's MESSENGER spacecraft and has also been observed telescopically from Earth.

NASA's NuSTAR, has helped to show that the spin rates of black holes can be measured conclusively. The solid lines show two theoretical models that explain low-energy X-ray emission seen previously from the spiral galaxy NGC 1365 by XMM-Newton.

The saucer-shaped test vehicle for NASA's Low-Density Supersonic Decelerator (LDSD) will undergo a series of events in the skies above Hawaii, with the ultimate goal of testing future landing technologies for Mars missions.

The north pole of Ganymede can be seen in center of this annotated image taken by the JIRAM infrared imager aboard NASA's Juno spacecraft on Dec. 26, 2019. Longitudinal lines appear every 30-degrees. The thick line is 0-degrees longitude. At the time the data for this image was captured, Juno was flying in the proximity of the north pole of the Jovian moon.

These composite images show a suspected plume of material erupting two years apart from the same location on Jupiter's icy moon Europa.

Sunspots are really visible evidence of the intense magnetic activity associated with them. The orange Sun (on top) shows what the Sun looks like in 'visible' light,' with the dark sunspots groups being the most noticeable features. The lower magnetogram, taken the same day, shows areas of magnetic intensity that reveals a close correlation between the two. The black and white areas indicate north and south polarity. Active regions with their intense magnetic activity are often the sources of so

This image, one of the closest taken of comet Hartley 2 by NASA's EPOXI mission, shows many features across the comet's surface. The length of the comet is equal to the distance between the Capitol building and the Washington Monument in Washington.

Hematite on Mars!

Mars Rotational and Orbital Dynamics

Diversity of Soils near Rover Deploy Region

This chart shows data from NASA's Kepler space telescope, which looks for planets by monitoring changes in the brightness of stars. As planets orbit in front of a star, they block the starlight, causing periodic dips.

This frame from a movie shows the progression of NASA's Near-Earth Object Wide-field Survey Explorer (NEOWISE) investigation for the mission's first three years following its restart in December 2013. Green circles represent near-Earth objects (asteroids and comets that come within 1.3 astronomical units of the sun; one astronomical unit is Earth's distance from the sun). Yellow squares represent comets. Gray dots represent all other asteroids, which are mostly in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. The orbits of Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars are shown. The spacecraft has characterized a total of 693 near-Earth objects since the mission was restarted in December 2013. Of these, 114 are new discoveries. A movie is avaiable at

A View of MESSENGER's Flight Path. This figure highlights the flight path of NASA's MESSENGER during its acquisition of images used in its flyover movie.

Where is MESSENGER

100% Coverage

Mercury's Surface Has More Iron + Titanium Than Previously Thought

This graph, or spectrum, from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope tells astronomers that some of the most basic ingredients of DNA and protein are concentrated in a dusty planet-forming disk circling a young sun-like star called IRS 46.

Infrared Observations of Europa's Trailing Side

This global digital map of Saturn's moon Rhea was created using data taken during Cassini and Voyager spacecraft flybys. The map is an equidistant projection and has a scale of 667 meters (2,188 feet) per pixel

During its flyby of Mercury, on January 14, 2008 NASA's MESSENGER spacecraft acquired the first high-resolution spectra of the planet's surface in ultraviolet, visible, and near-infrared light.

Time Series of Jupiter's Aurora

These images from the Cosmic Infrared Background Experiment, or CIBER, show large patches of the sky at two different infrared wavelengths (1.1 microns and 1.6 microns) after all known galaxies have been subtracted out and the images smoothed.

Often, the names of features on planetary bodies are connected through a specific theme -- for example, many features on the Moon have been named after famous scientists. NASA's Dawn mission, together with the International Astronomical Union, established that craters on Ceres would be named for agricultural deities from all over the world, and other features would be named for agricultural festivals. Ceres itself was named after the Roman goddess of corn and harvests by its discoverer, Giuseppe Piazzi, who spotted it with his telescope in 1801. Since March 2015, Dawn has been orbiting Ceres and sending back many intriguing images and other data about its features. Using suggestions from the Dawn team, the IAU recently approved 25 new Ceres feature names tied to theme of agricultural deities, marked in yellow on the map. Emesh Crater, for example, is named for the Sumerian god of vegetation and agriculture. Jumi is the Latvian god of fertility of the field. The newly named surface feat

Mimas: Closer Than Ever Before

Water Abundances Change with Time of Day

The red 'X' marks the spot where NASA's Curiosity rover landed on Mars. This is well within the targeted landing region, called the landing ellipse, marked by the light blue line.

Dark Dry Ice on Southern Cap - Lambert Albedo Image

This view from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter shows portions of the western rim of Endeavour Crater on Mars from a perspective looking toward the northwest.

This graphic from NASA's Curiosity mission shows close-ups of light-toned veins in rocks in the 'Yellowknife Bay' area of Mars together with analyses of their composition.

Hurricane Daniel intensified between July 18 and July 23rd. NASA's new CloudSat satellite was able to capture and confirm this transformation in its side-view images of Hurricane Daniel as seen in this series of images

This composite image shows a hot spot in Jupiter's atmosphere. In the image on the left, taken on Nov. 8, 2020, by NASA's Infrared Telescope Facility (IRTF) on the island of Hawaii, the hot spot appears bright in the infrared. The inset image on the right, taken by the JunoCam visible-light imager (also on Nov. 8, during Juno's 30th perijove pass), the hot spot appears dark and is flanked by high light-colored clouds to the south and a bright white storm to the west. Jupiter's hot spots have been known for a long time. On Dec. 7, 1995, the Galileo probe likely descended into a similar hot spot. To the naked eye, Jupiter's hot spots appear as dark, cloud-free spots in Jupiter's equatorial belt, but at infrared wavelengths, they are extremely bright, revealing the warm, deep atmosphere below the clouds. High-resolution images of hot spots such as these are key to understanding the role of storms and waves in Jupiter's atmosphere and to solving the mystery of Jupiter's elusive water. Citi

Diversity of Soils near Rover Deploy Region

Enceladus Atmosphere Not Global

Vector illustration of the comet in outer spaces

The latest spectra from NASA's New Horizons Ralph instrument reveal an abundance of methane ice, but with striking differences from place to place across the frozen surface of Pluto.

Enceladus Plume Neutral Mass Spectrum

Martian Dust Mostly Magnetic

This still from an animation created from data from the Microwave Limb Sounder instrument on NASA's Aura spacecraft depicts the complex interaction of chemicals involved in the destruction of ozone during the 2005 Arctic winter.

Mars Gully: No Mineral Trace of Liquid Water

Alice Views Jupiter and Io

This graphic shows the NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft and the location of its low-energy charged particle instrument. A labeled close-up of the low-energy charged particle instrument appears as the inset image.

Binary objects, such as the Earth and the moon or binary stars, orbit around a center of gravity that lies between them

Recipe for 'Bounce' Rock

This plot of data captured by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope reveals dust entrained in the winds rushing away from a quasar, or growing black hole. The quasar is called PG2112+059

A diagram of the Milky Way, depicting its various named parts

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Water Vapor & Particles Over Enceladus

Fresh off the recent successful deployment of its 20-foot (6-meter) reflector antenna and associated boom arm, NASA's SMAP observatory has successfully completed a two-day test of its science instruments.

This map illustrates the numerous star-forming clouds, called cold cores, that European Space Agency's Planck observed throughout our Milky Way galaxy. Planck detected around 10,000 of these cores, thousands of which had never been seen before.

A diagram comparing the Sun to VY Canis Majoris, the largest known star

Major-element Composition of Mercury Surface Materials

This plot of data from two space telescopes, NASA's NuSTAR and ESA's XMM-Newton determines for the first time the shape of ultra-fast winds from supermassive black holes, or quasars.

New Horizons took this montage of images of Jupiter's volcanic moon Io, glowing in the dark of Jupiter's shadow, as the Pluto-bound spacecraft sped through the Jupiter system on Feb. 27, 2007.

Water Ice Data Exploration (WIDE) Tool

True Colors Shining Through

Warm and Dry on Iapetus

This image-based surface map of Pluto was assembled by computer image processing software from four separate images of Pluto's disk taken with the European Space Agency's Faint Object Camera aboard NASA's Hubble Space Telescope.

Magnetometer Results from MESSENGER's Second Mercury Encounter

Using NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, astronomers have, for the first time, found signatures of silicate crystals around a newly forming protostar in the constellation of Orion.

Fermi's Large Area Telescope resolved high-energy gamma rays from an extended region around the active galaxy Centaurus A. The emission corresponds to million-light-year-wide radio-emitting gas thrown out by the galaxy's supersized black hole. This inset shows an optical/gamma-ray composite of the galaxy and its location on the Fermi one-year sky map.

This illustration of TOI 700 d is based on several simulated environments for an ocean-covered version of the planet.

PPR Great Red Spot Temperature Map

This infographic explains how NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope can be used in tandem with a telescope on the ground to measure the distances to planets discovered using the 'microlensing' technique.

This global map of Mars, based on data from NASA's Mars Odyssey, shows the estimated radiation dosages from cosmic rays reaching the surface, a serious health concern for any future human exploration of the planet.

Surface Chemistry Maps

NASA's NuSTAR has, for the first time, imaged the radioactive 'guts' of a supernova remnant, the leftover remains of a star that exploded. The NuSTAR data are blue, and show high-energy X-rays.

This topographic map from NASA's Dawn mission shows the two large impact basins in the southern hemisphere of the giant asteroid Vesta.

This image from NASA's Dawn mission shows three colorized views of the Oppia region in the southern hemisphere of the giant asteroid Vesta.

This global map of Mars, based on data from NASA's Mars Odyssey, shows estimates for amounts of high-energy-particle cosmic radiation reaching the surface, a serious health concern for any future human exploration of the planet.

Map of spectrum of sun and various elements; based on Bunsen and Kirchhoff. Coloured Lithograph published Leipzig; circa 1895.

Photo by Dunn Camera System Model BH-360 Conditions for Maximum BVI Noise.

This plot shows data obtained from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, and the Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment telescope located in Chile, during a 'microlensing' event.

Gravitational waves. Illustration of two black holes orbiting each other, emitting gravitational waves. Gravitational waves are a prediction of Einste...

Dust Spectra from Above and Below

Earth's internal structure, illustration

Pluto and Charon, the largest of Pluto's five known moons, seen Jan. 25 and 27, 2015, through the telescopic Long-Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) on NASA's New Horizons spacecraft.

This graph illustrates the Cepheid period-luminosity relationship, used to calculate the size, age and expansion rate of the universe. The data shown are from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope which has made the most precise measurements yet.

This plot shows the variation in brightness of the plume of material, composed of all the geysers erupting from the south polar terrain of Saturn's moon Enceladus, as a function of the moon's orbital position around Saturn.

Sensitive to Jupiter's stratospheric temperatures, these infrared images were recorded by the Cooled Mid-Infrared Camera and Spectrograph (COMICS) at the Subaru Telescope on the summit of Mauna Kea, Hawaii. Areas of the atmosphere that are more yellow and red indicate the hotter regions. Aurora produce enhanced and variable heating at Jupiter's poles. The heating occurs when the magnetosphere and the solar wind interact and deposit energy into Jupiter's atmosphere. Images were captured less than a day apart, from Jan. 11-12, 2017, and illustrate how quickly the atmosphere varied in response to the solar wind.

This graphic plots the source locations of geysers scientists have located on Enceladus' south polar terrain, with the 36 most active geyser sources marked and color coded by the behavior of the grains erupting from the geysers.

This composite image shows a hot spot in Jupiter's atmosphere. In the image on the left, taken on Sept. 16, 2020, by the Gemini North telescope on the island of Hawaii, the hot spot appears bright in the infrared at a wavelength of 5 microns. In the inset image on the right, taken by Juno's JunoCam visible-light imager, also on Sept. 16 during Juno's 29th perijove pass, the hot spot appears dark. Scientists have known of Jupiter's hot spots for a long time. On Dec. 7, 1995, the Galileo probe likely descended into a similar hot spot. To the naked eye, Jupiter's hot spots appear as dark, cloud-free areas in Jupiter's equatorial belt, but at infrared wavelengths, which are invisible to the human eye, they are extremely bright, revealing the warm, deep atmosphere below the clouds. High-resolution images of hot spots such as these are key both to understanding the role of storms and waves in Jupiter's atmosphere. Citizen scientist Brian Swift processed the images to enhance the color and co

Iapetus Temperature Variation Map

Lightning sounds from Saturn can be heard via radio signals received by the radio and plasma wave science instrument on the Cassini spacecraft

NASA's Curiosity rover used an instrument called SAM (Sample Analysis at Mars) to detect seasonal changes in atmospheric methane in Gale Crater. The methane signal has been observed for nearly three Martian years (nearly six Earth years), peaking each summer.

These images represent radar observations of asteroid 99942 Apophis on March 8, 9, and 10, 2021, as it made its last close approach before its 2029 Earth encounter that will see the object pass our planet by less than 20,000 miles (32,000 kilometers). The 70-meter radio antenna at the Deep Space Network's Goldstone Deep Space Communications Complex near Barstow, California, and the 100-meter Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia used radar to precisely track Apophis' motion. At the time of these observations, Apophis was about 10.6 million miles (17 million kilometers) from Earth, and each pixel has a resolution of 127 feet (38.75 meters). These observations helped scientists of the Center for Near Earth Object Studies (CNEOS), managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, precisely determine the 1,100-feet-wide (340-meter-wide) asteroid's orbit around the Sun, ruling out any Earth impact threat for the next hundred years or more. As a result of these observations, Apophis was removed f

Clinical research in the GHICL. Physical medicine unit in Saint Philibert hospital in Lille, France. Instrumental evaluation of balance and posture. The patient's posture is evaluated using a force plate in order to reveal balance-related problems or a pathology. Curves showing oscillation frequency in the patient.

This frame from an animation shows the coldest brown dwarf yet seen, and the fourth closest system to our sun. Called WISE J085510.83-071442.5, this dim object was discovered through its rapid motion across the sky.

DNA analysis

Titan Map

Using powerful ground-and space-based NASA telescopes, scientists have obtained a moving look at some of the wildest, weirdest weather in the solar system.

The Unpredictable Weather on Mars

This plot of data from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope reveals the light from a 'super Earth' called 55 Cancri e. The planet is the smallest yet, beyond our solar system, to reveal its direct light.

Topography on Titan

Phoebe: Cartographic Projections (North Polar Map)

The elements and molecules that flew out of the Cassiopeia A star when it exploded about 300 years ago can be seen clearly for the first time in this plot of data, called a spectrum, taken by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope.

Less Than Zero

NASA's New Horizons had an exciting flyby encounter with Jupiter in early 2007, and the spacecraft has been rapidly moving away from the giant planet ever since.

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