Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI; Processing: Joseph DePasquale (STScI)
Monday, 30 March 2026
Saturn’s icy rings glow in this infrared view from NASA’s JWST, released on March 25, 2026. The rings are extremely bright because they are made of highly reflective water ice. In addition, Saturn’s poles appear distinctly grey-green, indicating light emitting at wavelengths around 4.3 microns. This feature could come from a layer of high-altitude aerosols in Saturn’s atmosphere that scatters light differently at those latitudes. Another possible explanation is auroral activity, as charged molecules interacting with the planet’s magnetic field can produce glowing emissions near the poles.
Credit: NASA/ESA – S. Adenot
Tuesday, 31 March 2026
This photo was published on social media by ESA astronaut Sophie Adenot with the following caption:
Day 041, orbit 0639 – Technology and nature, two of my passions, in one shot. Our beautiful planet Earth, the Canadarm2, and the sunglint on the ISS solar panels. What a view! This picture was taken from the Cupola, looking forward and starboard (to the right).
Credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls
1 April 2026
NASA’s Artemis II Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and Orion spacecraft are seen atop a mobile launcher at Launch Complex 39B, Friday, March 27, 2026, at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. NASA’s Artemis II test flight will take Commander Reid Wiseman, Pilot Victor Glover, and Mission Specialist Christina Koch from NASA, and Mission Specialist Jeremy Hansen from the CSA (Canadian Space Agency), around the Moon and back to Earth with launch opportunities beginning in April 2026.
Credit: L. Sbordone/ESO
2 April 2026
While these two sunlit spheres share similarities in their shape and in being illuminated by the same star, they are vastly different. The one farthest away from the camera, hiding behind the clouds, is our own Moon, the Earth's only natural satellite. The other object is the dome of a telescope at ESO's La Silla Observatory, located on the outskirts of the Atacama Desert, in northern Chile.
The telescope is one of the three in the French project Exoplanets in Transits and their Atmospheres (ExTrA). ExTrA is focused on detecting Earth-sized worlds in the Milky Way. It relies on the transit method, in which planets block a fraction of the light from the star they orbit as they pass between the star and Earth, much like a partial eclipse. ExTrA centers on worlds orbiting red dwarfs – stars much smaller, colder, and dimmer than the Sun. Because red dwarfs are small, planets crossing in front of them block more light, making them easier to find than planets orbiting regular stars.
Who knows, perhaps some of these planets may look as otherworldly as the landscape of this picture. “These places compel me every time to think about our position in the Universe, putting my life ‘in context’ so to say,” says the photographer, ESO astronomer Luca Sbordone. “It always brings me peace.”
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UArizona; Description: Shane Byrne
3 April 2026
A bright ice cap of frozen water covers the North Pole of Mars. In the winter, thin coverings of carbon dioxide and water frost cover this area, and these frosts finally disappear at the end of the Martian spring season.
In this image, the winter frosts are about to disappear, and we can begin to see the surface features of the ice. The ice cap would be a bad place to get lost: it's one of the smoothest, flattest places on Mars, so there are no landmarks visible. The surface features are gently rolling hummocks (small mounds) and hollows, about 1 meter in height and 20 meters across. This monotonous landscape continues for hundreds of kilometers in every direction with this same repeating pattern.
Scientists do not know what makes this pattern so uniform over such large distances; we acquire HiRISE images like this one to look for small differences in these icy features from one place to another. Understanding this surface can help us understand the current climate and meteorological conditions at the North Pole of the Red Planet.
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