This picture was taken by the Mars Color Imager (MARCI) camera on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and covers an area about 1,000 miles (1,600 kilometers) wide on the Maritian surface. The atmosphere of the red planet seems to be experiencing dust storms when this particular weather related observation of Mars was made on March 20, 2014.
Titan is one of the 62 moons of planet Saturn, and is considered a very “planet like moon” being that it is the only natural satellite with a naturally dense atmosphere consisting mostly of nitrogen gas. The Cassini orbiter took this picture of Titan’s polar vortex from a distance of about 134,000 miles. The southern pole of Titan is in winter season but the Sun is still able to illuminate Titan’s polar vortex, while everything else is in shadow.
750 light years from Earth, constellation Serpens (or Serpent) is humming with cosmic activity as new stars are being born within the blanketing dust of the Serpens Cloud Core. The Spitzer space telescope initiative has numerous instruments and projects that focus on seeking out these budding young stars. This composite image includes data acquired over multiple hours from the Two Micron All Sky Survey (2MASS) and the Infrared Array Camera (IRAC) as part of their Young Stellar Object Variability (YSOVAR) project. The wavelengths cataloged in this picture include:
1.3 microns = blue
3.5 microns = green
4.6 microns = red
NASA’s Aqua scientific research satellite took this picture of first named storm of the 2014 North American hurricane season. This May 25, 2014 picture taken near the west coast of Mexico of Hurricane Amanda as it was building itself up as a category 4/5 hurricane with winds as high as 155 mph. Hurricane Amanda eventually weakened to a tropical depression into the eastern Pacific ocean.
This image of the 17 km long and 10 km wide asteroid was taken by the Galileo spacecraft as it flew by the asteroid Gaspra (951 Gaspra) on October 29, 1991. Gaspra resides near the inner edge of the asteroid belt and has a 7 hour rotation period. This picture is believed to have been taken at a range of 16,000 kilometers (10,000 miles) using Galileo’s solid-state imaging camera. Galileo’s encounter with Gaspra marked the first instance of an asteroid being (so) closely examined by a spacecraft.
