Space pictures
The HiRISE took this picture of the Ares Vallis region which sits on a Martian plateau. HiRISE camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter is operated by the University of Arizona and took this picture on January 1, 2015. The huge outflow channel, Ares Vallis is also close to where the Pathfinder/Sojourner Mars mission landed in 1997.
This picture of Pluto and its satellite, Charon, was taken back in 1994 by the Hubble Space Telescope’s Faint Object Camera (operated by the ESA). At the time this picture was taken, Pluto was 4.4 billion kilometers from Earth. Analysis from this image allowed scientists to very accurately measure Pluto’s diameter as 2,320 kilometers and Charon’s diameter to be 1,270 kilometers.
The European Space Agency’s Plank mission is described by them as including a large telescope that collects light from the, “Cosmic Microwave Background and focuses it onto the focal plane of the scientific instruments on board”. The end result is a picture like this where the texture shows us the direction of the galactic magnetic field with a color scale representing the emission from dust. The upper right hand corner of the image is where the dust emission is strongest along the plane of the galaxy.
The central part of this picture of the Milky Way galaxy, as taken by NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope, shows an amazing feature of our universe. The yellow parts of the infrared image, referred to as “yellowballs” by researchers, represent a phase of massive star formation in the galaxy. They are at an intermediary stage of massive star formation taking place before these stars create an emptiness in the surrounding gas and dust. These yellowballs are many times (100s or 1000s) the size of our solar system.
Mars Explorer Rover Opportunity had been scouring the martian surface for a few months when it took this 2004 picture, close to the Fram Crater. Though these look like large size pebbles and stones, this image only shows about a 3 centimeter cross section of the Mars surface and was taken by the microscopic imager camera on Opportunity’s robotic arm. The official name for the pebbles and stones is actually spherules – these mineral concentrations are called “blueberries” and are rich in hematite.
