Before we share images from recent and ongoing missions, we look back at past missions—Mars Global Surveyor and Galileo. Then, we share an infrared view of the night sky showcasing new laser communication technology, a new image of galaxy NGC 6951 from Hubble, and a sparkling picture of a star-forming region taken with Chandra and JWST.
Credit: NASA/JPL/Malin Space Science Systems
Monday, 20 October 2025
Remember Mars Global Surveyor (MGS)? Over its nine years in orbit, it examined the entire planet in detail, overhauled our knowledge of Mars, and helped Mars rover and lander missions by identifying landing sites and relaying surface telemetry. Here is a mosaic of Mars from its images.
Credit: NASA/JPL
Tuesday, 21 October 2025
This color picture was created from images taken by the imaging system on NASA's Galileo spacecraft approximately 14 minutes before its closest approach to asteroid 243 Ida on August 28, 1993. The range from the spacecraft was about 10,500 kilometers. The images used are from the sequence in which Ida's moon, Dactyl, was originally discovered; the moon is visible to the right of the asteroid. Dactyl was the first moon of an asteroid ever discovered.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech; Text: Ian J. O’Neill
Wednesday, 22 October 2025
In this infrared photograph taken on June 2, 2025, the Optical Communications Telescope Laboratory at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s Table Mountain Facility near Wrightwood, California, beams its eight-laser beacon to the Deep Space Optical Communications (DSOC) flight laser transceiver aboard NASA’s Psyche spacecraft. At the time, Psyche was about 230 million kilometers from Earth.
Managed by JPL, DSOC successfully demonstrated that data encoded in laser photons could be reliably transmitted, received, and then decoded after traveling millions of miles from Earth out to Mars distances. Nearly two years after launching aboard the agency’s Psyche mission in 2023, the demonstration completed its 65th and final “pass” on Sept. 2, 2025, sending a laser signal to Psyche and receiving the return signal from 350 million kilometers away.
Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, L. C. Ho, G. Brammer, A. Filippenko, C. Kilpatrick
Thursday, 23 October 2025
The glittering galaxy in this NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image is NGC 6951, located approximately 70 million light-years away in the constellation Cepheus.
As this Hubble image shows, NGC 6951 is a spiral galaxy with plenty of intriguing structures. Most eye-catching are its spiral arms, which are dotted with brilliant red nebulae, bright blue stars, and filamentary dust clouds. The spiral arms loop around the galactic centre, which has a golden glow that comes from a population of older stars. The centre of the galaxy is also distinctly elongated, revealing the presence of a slowly rotating bar of stars.
NGC 6951’s bar may be responsible for another remarkable feature: a white-blue ring that encircles the very heart of the galaxy. This is called a circumnuclear starburst ring — essentially, a circle of enhanced star formation around the nucleus of a galaxy. The bar funnels gas toward the centre of the galaxy, where it collects in a ring about 3800 light-years across. Two dark dust lanes that run parallel to the bar mark the points where gas from the bar enters the ring.
The dense gas of a circumnuclear starburst ring is the perfect environment to churn out an impressive number of stars. Using data from Hubble, astronomers have identified more than 80 potential star clusters within NGC 6951’s ring. Many of the stars formed less than 100 million years ago, but the ring itself is longer-lived, potentially having existed for 1 to 1.5 billion years.
Astronomers have imaged NGC 6951 with Hubble for a wide variety of reasons, including mapping the dust in nearby galaxies, studying the centers of disc galaxies, and monitoring recent supernovae (of which NGC 6951 has hosted five or six).
Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/SAO; Infrared: NASA/ESA/CSA/STScI; Image Processing: NASA/CXC/SAO/J. Major; Text: Megan Watzke.
Friday, 24 October 2025
Data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope combine to reveal an otherworldly view of the star-forming region IC 348. In this image released on July 23, 2025, X-rays from Chandra are red, green, and blue, while infrared data from Webb are pink, orange, and purple.
The wispy structures that dominate the image are interstellar material that reflects the light from the cluster’s stars; this is known as a reflection nebula. The point-like sources in Chandra’s X-ray data are young stars in the cluster developing there.
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