Credit: NASA, ESA, STScI, D. Jewitt (UCLA), M.-T. Hui (Shanghai Astronomical Observatory). Image Processing: J. DePasquale (STScI)
Monday, 8 December 2025
NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope reobserved interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS on Nov. 30, with its Wide Field Camera 3 instrument. At the time, the comet was about 178 million miles (286 million kilometers) from Earth. Hubble tracked the comet as it moved across the sky. As a result, background stars appear as streaks of light.
Hubble previously observed 3I/ATLAS in July, shortly after its discovery, and several NASA missions have since studied the comet. Observations are expected to continue for several more months as 3I/ATLAS heads out of the solar system.
Credit: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin
Tuesday, 9 December 2025
Is it an insect? A strange fossil? An otherworldly eye, or even a walnut? No, it’s an intriguing kind of martian butterfly spotted by ESA’s Mars Express.
Insects aren’t commonplace on Mars, so it’s no surprise that this is no butterfly as we know it. It’s actually a kind of crater, formed as a space rock hurtled towards the Red Planet and collided with its red-brown surface.
The collision caused two distinct lobes of material to be flung outwards to the crater’s north and south, creating two outstretched ‘wings’ of raised ground. The wings of this particular butterfly crater are rather undefined and irregular. Still, they can be seen extending to the lower left and upper right of the main walnut-esque crater shown here.
This crater measures roughly 20 km east-west and 15 km north-south. It lies in the Idaeus Fossae region of Mars, in the planet’s northern lowlands.
Credit: NASA/ESA, John Clarke (University of Michigan)
Wednesday, 10 December 2025
This is a spectacular NASA Hubble Space Telescope close-up view of an electric-blue aurora that is eerily glowing one half billion miles away on the giant planet Jupiter. Auroras are curtains of light resulting from high-energy electrons racing along the planet's magnetic field into the upper atmosphere. The electrons excite atmospheric gases, causing them to glow. The image shows the main oval of the aurora, which is centered on the magnetic north pole, plus more diffuse emissions inside the polar cap.
Though the aurora resembles the same phenomenon that crowns Earth's polar regions, the Hubble image shows unique emissions from the magnetic "footprints" of three of Jupiter's largest moons. (These points are reached by following Jupiter's magnetic field from each satellite down to the planet.)
Auroral footprints can be seen in this image from Io (along the left-hand limb), Ganymede (near the center), and Europa (just below and to the right of Ganymede's auroral footprint). These emissions, produced by electric currents generated by the satellites, flow along Jupiter's magnetic field, bouncing in and out of the upper atmosphere. They are unlike anything seen on Earth.
This ultraviolet image of Jupiter was taken with the Hubble Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS) on November 26, 1998. In this ultraviolet view, the aurora stands out clearly, but Jupiter's cloud structure is masked by haze.
Credit: ESA/NASA
Thursday, 11 December 2025
The atmosphere of Titan, one of Saturn’s moons, appears similar to that on Earth about 3.5 billion years ago, before life appeared.
After a seven-year journey on board the Cassini spacecraft, ESA’s Huygens probe reached Titan’s surface, marking the most distant landing ever achieved by a spacecraft. During the descent, its cameras collected data on the dense atmosphere and took the first-ever images of the surface.
These revealed an extraordinary world with lakes, islands, and erosion features similar to those that shape our planet, confirming that liquid methane once flowed there. Methane on Titan is found in liquid form, not as a gas, due to the intense pressure and cold temperatures, about –180° C.
Credit: CNSA/Handout via Xinhua
Friday, 12 December 2025
This image, released by the China National Space Administration (CNSA), shows a view of the Earth captured by the Tianwen-2 probe on May 30, 2025, and post-processed by scientific researchers.
The CNSA said that the narrow-field-of-view navigation sensor equipped on the probe recently captured the images of Earth and the moon, demonstrating good functional performance.
The images released include a photograph of Earth obtained by Tianwen-2 when it was approximately 590,000 kilometers away from the planet.
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