Credit: NASA
Monday, 6 July 2026
Remember when everything we knew about Mars was the Viking orbiter images? Then came the landers and more orbiters, then the rovers and the helicopter. Today, we are searching for life on Mars, and we stand on the shoulders of giants.
Mars' Argyre Basin, an 1800 km wide impact crater in the southern hemisphere, is probably the best-preserved large impact basin in the Solar System. This oblique image, taken looking northeast across the crater, was taken by Viking Orbiter 1 on July 25, 1976.
Credit: NASA/Jessica Meir
Tuesday, 7 July 2026
The aurora australis arcs over Earth during an active solar event in this photograph taken on June 5, 2026, from the International Space Station as it orbited 271 miles above the Indian Ocean southwest of Perth, Australia.
Auroras are colorful, dynamic, and often visually delicate displays of an intricate dance of particles and magnetism between the Sun and Earth, known as space weather.
Credit: China National Space Administration
Wednesday, 8 July 2026
China’s Tianwen-2 spacecraft has arrived at Kamoʻoalewa, a tiny asteroid that travels alongside Earth as one of only a handful of known quasi-satellites. Some researchers suspect this unusual object may be a fragment blasted from the Moon long ago, and Tianwen-2 is now poised to help solve the mystery.
The mission marks the start of an ambitious investigation. Tianwen-2 will attempt to collect a sample from Kamoʻoalewa’s surface before spending months mapping and studying the asteroid from orbit, gathering clues about its composition, history, and possible lunar origin.
Credit: Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA)
Thursday, 9 July 2026
This is asteroid (98943) Torifune, as imaged with the Optical Navigation Camera –Telescopic (ONC-T) onboard JAXA's Hayabusa2. The spacecraft successfully conducted a flyby of the nearly 500-meter rock, the first asteroid exploration of the Hayabusa2 Extended Mission, on 5 July at 18:35 JST. The Hayabusa2 spacecraft was confirmed from ground communications to be operating normally.
Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute/CICLOPS
Friday, 10 July 2026
Vertical structures, among the tallest seen in Saturn's main rings, rise abruptly from the edge of Saturn's B ring, casting long shadows on the ring in this image taken by NASA's Cassini spacecraft two weeks before the planet's August 2009 equinox.
Part of the Cassini Division, between the B and the A rings, appears at the top of the image, showing ringlets in the inner division.
Cassini scientists believe this is a prominent region at the outer edge of the B ring where large bodies, or moonlets, up to 1 kilometer in size are found. It is possible that these bodies significantly affect the ring material streaming past them, forcing the particles upward in a "splashing" manner.
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