Our space telescopes, rovers, and cameras have all caught amazing sights, from comet fragments impacting Jupiter to a gravitationally lensed quasar, and from the surface of Mars to the glittering surface of Earth. Enjoy this week's selection of beauty and wonder!
Credit: Hubble Space Telescope Comet Team and NASA
Monday, 29 September 2025
Some of Hubble's most "impactful" observations captured comet fragments crashing into Jupiter. Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 was shredded by Jupiter’s gravity, and its fragments (21 in all) plunged into Jupiter’s atmosphere over the course of six days in 1994, during Hubble's fifth year. At impact, the fragments were traveling at a speed of about 60 km per second! This caused giant plumes of material from Jupiter’s lower atmosphere, like the splash of throwing a rock into a pond.
Eight impact sights are visible. From left to right are the E/F complex (barely visible on the edge of the planet), the star-shaped H site, the impact sites for tiny N, Q1, small Q2, and R, and on the far right limb, the D/G complex. The D/G complex also shows extended haze at the edge of the planet.
Credit: ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA, A. Nierenberg
Tuesday, 30 September 2025
This picture from the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope features the gravitational lensing of the quasar known as RX J1131-1231, located roughly six billion light-years from Earth in the constellation Crater. It is considered one of the best lensed quasars discovered to date, as the foreground galaxy distorts the image of the background quasar into a bright arc, creating four images of the object.
Gravitational lensing, first predicted by Einstein, provides a unique opportunity to study regions close to the black holes in distant quasars by acting as a natural telescope and magnifying the light from these sources. All matter in the Universe warps the space around itself, with larger masses producing a stronger effect. Around very massive objects, such as galaxies, light that passes close by follows this warped space, appearing to bend away from its original path by a clearly visible amount. One of the consequences of gravitational lensing is that it can magnify distant astronomical objects, allowing astronomers to study objects that would otherwise be too faint or too far away.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Wednesday, 1 October 2025
NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover used its right-front navigation camera to capture this first view over the rim of Jezero Crater on Dec. 10, 2024, the 1,354th Martian day, or sol, of the mission. The camera is positioned to face west from a location nicknamed “Lookout Hill.”
Taking about 3½ months and ascending 500 vertical meters, the rover climbed 20% grades, making stops along the way for science observations.
Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Yu Cheng (NAOJ); Image Processing: Joseph DePasquale (STScI)
Thursday, 2 October 2025
NASA's James Webb Space Telescope recently imaged a gigantic and symmetric protostellar jet at the outskirts of our Milky Way galaxy in the forming cluster Sh2-284. From tip to tip, this protostellar jet is 8 light-years across, about double the distance from our Sun to its closest neighboring star system, Alpha Centauri.
Its detection provides evidence that protostellar jets scale with the mass of their parent star—the more massive the stellar engine driving the plasma, the larger the resulting jet—and thus for a universal mechanism for star formation from low to high masses.
Credit: NASA/Tim Kopra
Friday, 3 October 2025
Golden sunglint highlights Lake Balkhash in this May 31, 2016, photo taken from the International Space Station. The large lake in Kazakhstan is one of the largest lakes in Asia and is the 15th largest lake in the world.
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