Credit: KARI/ESA
Monday, 2 March 2026
Korea’s Kompsat-2 satellite captured this image over the sand seas of the Namib Desert on 7 January 2012. The blue-and-white area is the dry riverbed of the Tsauchab. Black dots of vegetation are concentrated close to the river’s main route, while salt deposits appear bright white. Running through the river valley, a road connects Sossusvlei to the Sesriem settlement. At the road’s 45th kilometre, seen at the lower-central part of the image, a white path shoots off and ends at a circular parking area at the base of a dune. This is Dune 45, a popular tourist stop on the way to and from Sossusvlei. In this image, there appears to be some shadow on the western side. From this, we can deduce that the image was acquired during the late morning.
Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI; Processing: Joseph DePasquale (STScI)
Tuesday, 3 March 2026
Two heads are better than one in the latest images from NASA’s JWST, which reveal new details in a mysterious, little-studied nebula surrounding a dying star.
Nebula PMR 1 is a cloud of gas and dust that bears an uncanny resemblance to a brain in a transparent skull, inspiring its nickname, the “Exposed Cranium” nebula.
The nebula appears to have distinct regions that capture different phases of its evolution — an outer shell of gas that was blown off first and is mostly hydrogen, and an inner cloud with more structure that contains a mix of gases.
Credit: ESA/Webb, NASA, CSA, STScI, P. Tiranti, H. Melin, M. Zamani (ESA/Webb)
Wednesday, 4 March 2026
NASA’s JWST provided the first vertical view of Uranus’s ionosphere in this image released on Feb. 19, 2026, revealing auroras shaped by its tilted magnetic field.
Getting a look at the structure of the region where the atmosphere interacts strongly with the planet’s magnetic field is giving us the most detailed portrait yet of where its auroras form, how the magnetic field influences them, and also data on how Uranus’s atmosphere has continued to cool since the 1990s.
Uranus has the strangest magnetosphere in the Solar System. It is tilted and offset from the planet’s rotation axis (and this planet already rolls around the Sun nearly on its side), which means auroras move across the surface in complex ways. A better understanding of Uranus will provide insight into ice-giant planets and help us better characterize giant planets beyond our Solar System.
Credit: ESA/Juice/JANUS
Thursday, 5 March 2026
This striking image from the science camera on ESA’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (Juice) shows interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS spewing dust and gas. The tiny nucleus of the comet (not visible) is surrounded by a bright halo of gas known as the coma. A long tail stretches away from the comet, and we see hints of rays, jets, streams and filaments.
The inset in the image shows the same data, but processed to highlight the coma structure. The arrows in the top left indicate the direction in which the comet was moving (blue) and the relative direction of the Sun (yellow). While 3I/ATLAS is a visitor from interstellar space, travelling from outside the Solar System, its behaviour is completely in line with that expected from a ‘normal’ comet.
The camera, named JANUS, took this image on 6 November 2025, just seven days after the comet made its closest approach to the Sun. At the time, Juice was about 66 million km away from the comet.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS
Friday, 6 March 2026
From orbit, parts of Mars look like sprawling spiderwebs etched across the hillsides. These patterns may record a time when groundwater flowed through large fractures in the rock, leaving minerals behind. Over time, those minerals hardened into ridges while the surrounding rock—lacking that reinforcement—was slowly worn away by wind.
Up close, those mineral deposits appear as tiny bumps embedded in the rock. These pea-sized nodules likely formed billions of years ago as groundwater evaporated, leaving minerals behind. NASA’s Curiosity rover photographed these features on Aug. 21, 2025, while exploring geologic formations known as boxwork.
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