#PPOD: Absolutely gorgeous new (Feb 29th) view taken by NASA's Curiosity rover on Mars, looking back down the slope of Mt. Sharp in the center of Gale Crater. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS/fredk/S Atkinson
#PPOD: Let's start the week with a significant otter discovery in otter space discoveries 😂. Hopefully, this will put a smile on your face this Monday! The images in question are of the Cosmic Cliffs in the Carina Nebula and detail the progression of observations from ground- to space-based telescopes and to the wonder of JWST. Credit: ESO, NASA/ESA/CSA, In Otter News
#PPOD: This is a photomicrograph of a dendrite star snowflake captured with a Scanning Electron Microscope. Enjoy a beautiful image on this Leap Day! Credit: MEE/Kurt Schenk
#PPOD: As spring dawns on the Northern Hemisphere of Mars, dunes of sand near the poles begin to defrost. Thinner regions of ice typically thaw first revealing sand whose darkness soaks in sunlight and accelerates the thaw. The process might involve sandy jets exploding through the thinning ice. By summer, the spots expand to encompass the entire dunes which are then completely thawed and dark. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona
#PPOD: A closeup of Europa's complicated surface from Galileo on its 19th orbit of Jupiter in February 1999. This image shows cracks and ridges on Europa's surface that reveal a detailed geologic history that may be related to changing tidal forces as Europa orbits Jupiter. Credit: NASA, via Ted Stryk
#PPOD: An approximate natural-color view of the volcanic Tvashtar Paterae region of Io, made from images acquired by NASA's #Galileo spacecraft on Feb. 22, 2000. For an idea of scale, the dark kidney-shaped patera near the center is about 50 kilometers long and 20 kilometers wide. Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / Jason Major
#PPOD: This image of ridges in Aeolis Planum tells a story of ancient rivers and a Mars very different to that of today. These ridges show the location of the old river beds in Mars' distant past. The angle at which the ridges join together indicate that these rivers flowed from top-right to bottom-left (i.e. southwest). Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona
#PPOD: A montage of Jupiter and an erupting Io as viewed through the lens of NASA's New Horizons spacecraft in 2007 while on the way to Pluto, which it reached eight years later. Credit: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI/GSFC
#PPOD: This image of Earth was taken during the close flyby of NASA’s Juno spacecraft on October 9, 2013. The image is a combination of the JunoCam instrument's red, green and blue spectral filters and approximates natural color. The image is a mosaic of 82 individual frames taken as the spacecraft spun. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS/Gerald Eichstädt
#PPOD: Barely 15,600 years separate the left picture from the right, in a stunning shortcut of human technological evolution. On the left is a footprint in the lunar dust caused by Buzz Aldrin's moon boot on July 20, 1969; on the right is a late Pleistocene human footprint from the Pilauco archaeological site in northern Patagonia, Chile. Credit: NASA; Karen Moreno/PLOS One
#PPOD: Chasma Boreale is a long, flat-floored valley that cuts deep into Mars' north polar icecap. Its walls rise about 1,400 meters (4,600 feet) above the floor. Where the edge of the ice cap has retreated, sheets of sand are emerging that accumulated during earlier ice-free climatic cycles. Winds blowing off the ice have pushed loose sand into dunes and driven them down-canyon in a westward direction, toward our viewpoint. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU
#PPOD: A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying Intuitive Machines’ Nova-C lunar lander lifts off Thursday, Feb. 15, 2024. As part of NASA’s CLPS initiative and Artemis campaign, Intuitive Machines’ first lunar mission will carry science and commercial payloads to the Moon to study plume-surface interactions, space weather/lunar surface interactions, radio astronomy, precision landing technologies, communication/navigation node for future autonomous navigation technologies. Credit: NASA / Kim Shiflett
“Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives.” - Carl Sagan
This image was taken by the Voyager 1 spacecraft on 14 February at Sagan’s suggestion. Voyager was about 6.4 billion kilometers from our tiny dot of a world and heading out of our solar system.
#PPOD: This striking view of Jupiter's Great Red Spot and turbulent southern hemisphere was captured by NASA's Juno spacecraft as it performed a close pass of the gas giant planet. Juno took the three images used to produce this color-enhanced view on Feb. 12, 2019, as the spacecraft performed its 17th science pass of Jupiter. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS @kevinmgill
#PPOD: Pictured here is Saturn's moon Enceladus, its south polar plumes lit by sunlight and its seamed nightside washed with the yellow glow of the light coming from Saturn. Taken by NASA's Cassini spacecraft on 30 November 2010. 🛰🪐 Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / SSI / Gordan Ugarkovic
#PPOD: NASA's Perseverance rover took this picture of the Ingenuity drone perched on a sand dune, its final resting place after 72 amazing flights. Damage to the rotors has grounded the little companion. So long, little friend. You made everyone proud. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU/Jason Major
#PPOD: This high-exposure photograph revealed Earth's atmospheric glow against the backdrop of a starry sky in this image taken from the International Space Station on Jan. 21, 2024. At the time, the orbital lab was 258 miles above the Pacific Ocean northeast of Papua New Guinea. The Nauka science module and Prichal docking module are visible at left. Credit: NASA, ESA/Andreas Mogensen
#PPOD: This exquisite image is from the HiRISE camera onboard NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and shows polar dunes in the southern hemisphere of Mars. When spring comes and temperatures go up, the CO2 ice trapped underneath the sand melts and creates what are known as slope streaks. Sometimes, sublimation will also create jets of CO2 gas. What you see is the result of darker sand surfaces exposed by these processes. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona
This amazing new image is Jupiter's moon Io as taken by the JunoCam onboard NASA's Juno spacecraft on February 3, 2024! The night side can be seen due to reflected light from Jupiter.
#PPOD: NASA's Europa Clipper spacecraft is seen in the main clean room of the Spacecraft Assembly Facility at the agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory on Jan. 19, 2024. The tent around the spacecraft was erected to support electromagnetic testing. Set to launch from Kennedy Space Center in Florida in October, Europa Clipper will arrive at the Jupiter system in 2030 and conduct about 50 flybys of the moon Europa. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
#PPOD: This is neither an impact crater nor a volcano. It is a perfect circular intrusion, about 10km in diameter with a topographic ridge up to 600m high. The Kondyor Massif is located in Eastern Siberia, Russia, north of the city of Khabarovsk. It is a rare form of igneous intrusion called alkaline-ultrabasic massif and it is full of rare minerals. The river flowing out of it forms placer mineral deposits. Credit: NASA/GSFC/METI/ERSDAC/JAROS, and U.S./Japan ASTER Science Team
#PPOD: In this Voyager 1 image of Io, one of Jupiter’s four largest moons, the volcanic plume from the Pele volcano rises 300 kilometers (190 miles) above the surface, and the plume fallout covers an area the size of Alaska. Credit: NASA / JPL / USGS
#PPOD: The Earth is a tilted top, spinning at an angle (about 23 degrees) as it orbits the Sun. Because of this, there are only two times a year when both hemispheres receive light from pole to pole: the equinoctes (the plural of “equinox”). At 05:30 UTC on Sep. 22, 2013—just hours before the actual moment of the equinox—the Russian weather satellite Elektro-L took the photo above, showing our evenly lit planet. Credit: Roscosmos / NTs OMZ / SRC Planeta
#PPOD: Although liquids freeze and evaporate quickly into the thin atmosphere of Mars, persistent winds may make large sand dunes appear to flow and even drip like a liquid. As winds blow from right to left, flowing sand on and around the hills leaves picturesque streaks. The dark arc-shaped droplets of fine sand are called barchans and are the interplanetary cousins of similar Earth-based sand forms. Credit: HiRISE, MRO, LPL (U. Arizona), NASA (via APOD)