NASA’s Dawn spacecraft took this picture of Ceres, a dwarf planet in our solar system, using its framing cameras. These two instruments were designed as Dawn’s “eyes” and to help measure the size and shape of Vesta and Ceres, as the spacecraft explored our asteroid belt where the dwarf planet Ceres resides (between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter). This picture was taken from a distance of 83,000 kilometers.
No matter how many pictures one may have seen of them, the rings of Saturn have a fascinating, almost mystical effect on many people. For this reason the Cassini space probe and its advanced imaging systems have been a boon for Saturn enthusiasts. The on board narrow angle camera took this picture of the rings in red light so that researchers could study the subtle color variations of Saturn’s rings (as they are all red). This shot captured the rings from a distance of approximately 1.4 million kilometers away from Saturn, looking toward the sunlit side of the planet’s rings and about 11 degrees above the ringplane.
X-ray astronomy is used to detect and study astronomical objects and the Sun provides us with plenty of such data as we try and learn more about it. NASA’s Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) and Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) provided data which was combined to form this picture of high energy x-rays streaming off the Sun. The high energy emissions, shown in blue (3 to 5 kilo-electron volts) and green (2 to 3 kilo-electron volts) are from NuSTAR’s data and come from gases that may be heated to over 3 million degrees. The SDO data in this composite image is the areas in red which consists of ultraviolet light at 171 angstrom wavelength.
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.
