Another interesting rock discovered by Perseverance on Mars, a look back at a dangerous super typhoon, and two stunning new images from JWST.
This image from NASA’s Mars Perseverance rover, a fusion-processed SuperCam Remote Micro-Imager (RMI) mosaic, shows part of the “St. Pauls Bay” target, acquired from the lower Witch Hazel Hill area of the Jezero crater rim. The image reveals hundreds of strange, spherical-shaped objects comprising the rock. Perseverance acquired this image on March 11, 2025.
This mind-boggling image of the largest planet in our solar system is courtesy of the James Webb Space Telescope. You can clearly see moons and rings as well. Jupiter's main ring was discovered in 1979 by NASA's passing Voyager 1 spacecraft, but its origin was then a mystery. Data from NASA's Galileo spacecraft, however, that orbited Jupiter from 1995 to 2003 confirmed the hypothesis that this ring was created by meteoroid impacts on small nearby moons.
Friday, 4 April 2025
NASA’s JWST has provided the clearest look yet at the iconic multi-planet system HR 8799. The observations detected carbon dioxide in each of the planets, which provides strong evidence that the system’s four giant planets formed, much like Jupiter and Saturn, by slowly building solid cores that attract gas from within a protoplanetary disk.
Colors are applied to filters from Webb’s NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera), revealing their intrinsic differences. A star symbol marks the location of the host star HR 8799, whose light has been blocked by a coronagraph.
The colors in this image, which represent different wavelengths captured by Webb’s NIRCam, tell researchers about the temperatures and composition of the planets. HR 8799 b, which orbits around 6.3 billion miles from the star, is the coldest of the bunch, and the richest in carbon dioxide. HR 8799 e orbits 1.5 billion miles from its star and likely formed closer to the host star, where there were stronger variations in the composition of the material.
In this image, the color blue is assigned to the 4.1-micron light, green to 4.3-micron light, and red to the 4.6-micron light.
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