Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS
Monday, 3 August 2026
NASA's Curiosity Mars rover captured these clouds just after sunset on March 19, 2021, the 3,063rd Martian day, or sol, of the rover's mission. The image is made up of 21 individual images stitched together and color corrected so that the scene appears as it would to the human eye. The clouds are drifting over "Mont Mercou," a cliff face that Curiosity has been studying. The rover captured the image using its Mast Camera (Mastcam).
Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI; Image Processing: Alyssa Pagan (STScI), Joseph DePasquale (STScI), Macarena Garcia Marin (ESA Office at STScI)
Tuesday, 4 August 2026
In this July 6, 2026, image, NASA’s JWST’s Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) reveals the nearby galaxy Centaurus A, exposing the dusty structures and hidden activity that shape this unusual system.
Centaurus A is 11 million light-years away from Earth, relatively close in cosmic terms. Yet, unlike most nearby galaxies, it is very active, making it a powerful laboratory for understanding how galaxies and black holes grow and evolve together.
Credit: ESA/Proba-3/WAC
Wednesday, 5 August 2026
At first glance, this is just another image of Earth.
But look closely, and you will be able to make out Proba-3’s Coronagraph spacecraft hiding in plain sight, covering parts of the Indonesian Archipelago to the right of the Indian Ocean’s vast expanse.
While the pictured Coronagraph only has eyes for the Sun and its surrounding corona, the mission’s other spacecraft – the Occulter – uses a camera system to autonomously adjust its position relative to the Coronagraph.
Credit: ESO/K. Minker et al.
Thursday, 6 August 2026
These images depict different angles of a very peculiar asteroid named (44) Nysa. Asteroids are leftovers from the formation of the planets in the Solar System, with most found in a circular belt between Mars and Jupiter. These rocky bodies come in various shapes and sizes, but new images of (44) Nysa, located at the inner edge of the asteroid belt, reveal an unusual structure unlike any previously observed!
To resolve (44) Nysa’s shape, a team of astronomers used the SPHERE instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope in Chile and SHARK-VIS, an instrument by the Italian National Institute for Astrophysics on the Large Binocular Telescope in the USA. Both instruments use adaptive optics to correct atmospheric blur and obtain crisp images of this asteroid.
The data show that the asteroid is 80 km across and is composed of three distinct blobs, or ‘lobes’, joined by two narrower sections that encircle the asteroid, or ‘necks’. All previous identifications of asteroids with a neck have been interpreted as ‘bilobates’, having just two lobes, but (44) Nysa has a unique ‘trilobate’ structure.
The team has two possible explanations for how (44) Nysa got its odd shape. Either the asteroid originates from a single object that was heavily deformed through collisions, or is a composite of three objects that impacted and merged, forming necks at the point of contact.
Credit: ESA/Euclid/Euclid Consortium/NASA, CFHT, image processing by J.-C. Cuillandre and E. Bertin (CEA Paris-Saclay)
Friday, 7 August 2026
The largest and most detailed photo ever made of our Milky Way galaxy’s center in visible light is revealed in this cutout image from the European Space Agency’s Euclid mission. Packed with more than 60 million stars, this image opens the door for scientists to confirm the existence of any exoplanet found in this region and measure its mass using tiny changes in starlight over time.
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