Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, Matthew Tiscareno (SETI Institute), Matthew Hedman (University of Idaho), Maryame El Moutamid (Cornell University), Mark Showalter (SETI Institute), Leigh Fletcher (University of Leicester), Heidi Hammel (AURA); Processing: Joseph DePasquale (STScI).
Monday, 16 March 2026
On June 25, 2023, NASA’s JWST turned to the famed ringed world Saturn for its first near-infrared observations of the planet.
Saturn itself appears extremely dark at this infrared wavelength observed by the telescope, as methane gas absorbs almost all of the sunlight falling on the atmosphere. However, the icy rings remain relatively bright, resulting in Saturn's unusual appearance in the JWST image.
Credit: Jesse Allen and Robert Simmon, using Landsat data provided by the United States Geological Survey; Caption: Holli Riebeek.
Tuesday, 17 March 2026
Covered in heath, the solitary rocky hill known as Slieve Gullion rises above the farmland of Northern Ireland in this true-color Landsat image from May 24, 2001. According to Irish mythology, hunter and warrior Finn McCool bathed in the lake on Slieve Gullion and emerged decades older. However, we don’t need a dip in the lake to move through time. A glance at the landscape reveals millions of years of history.
Looking out from the summit of Slieve Gullion, the mythical Finn McCool (or anyone else who climbed to the top, for that matter) would see a ring of rocky hills surrounding the Slieve. From a satellite view hundreds of kilometers above Earth, the formation's circular shape is even more evident. Known as the Ring of Gullion, the ancient hills are nearly 60 million years old. They formed either when an ancient volcano collapsed—leaving a circular fault into which molten rock seeped—or when layers of magma built up in layers in the volcano. This type of formation is called a ring dyke.
Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Intuitive Machines.
Wednesday, 18 March 2026
Early-morning sunlight illuminates the western wall of this unnamed crater, casting deep shadows on the ground and within the crater. The image was taken on August 30, 2023, by LROC (Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera). LROC is a system of three cameras and one of the seven instruments aboard NASA’s LRO (Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter) mission, which launched in June 2009 and continues in orbit around the Moon.
Credit: contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data (2025), processed by ESA.
Thursday, 19 March 2026
This image from the Copernicus Sentinel-1 mission shows us the maritime traffic passing through the Øresund Strait in 2025.
The 118-km-long Øresund Strait (also known as the Sound) separates Denmark to the west from Sweden to the east and links the Baltic Sea to the North Sea, which makes it one of the busiest waterways in the world.
Sentinel-1 satellites carry radar instruments to provide an all-weather, day-and-night supply of imagery of Earth’s surface, making it ideal to monitor ship traffic. Here, more than 50 radar images over the same area, acquired every six days throughout 2025, have been compressed into a single image.
In this image, ships appear as bright, sparkly dots in the dark waters of the strait. The routes of marine traffic are clear to see in the channel, with the main shipping lanes highlighted by the concentration of ships.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UArizona; Description: Shane Byrne.
Friday, 20 March 2026
When they form, impact craters dig up material from below the surface and throw it outwards into what geologists call an ejecta blanket. The fastest ejected material travels the furthest, so material from different depths can end up at different distances from the crater.
This HiRISE image shows a pedestal crater in Arcadia Planitia, Mars, with material of varying brightness and color at different distances from the crater. This could tell us more about the material that’s buried below the surface here, but the situation is complex.
These pedestal craters have been significantly eroded so that not all parts of the eject blanket are equally preserved. A detailed geologic map of features like this can often tease apart these confounding factors and tell us more about what’s beneath Mars's surface.
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