Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona
Monday, 29 June 2026
NASA’s Perseverance rover appears as a green speck on the Martian surface on June 13, 2026, a day before the robotic explorer marked a distance milestone, having traveled a full marathon (26.2 miles, or 42.195 kilometers) on the Red Planet. Perseverance reached that distance after five years and four months of driving — on the 1,890th Martian day, or sol, of its mission; the previous record holder, NASA’s Opportunity rover, took 11 years and two months to reach the same milestone.
This image was taken by NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) using its High-Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera. The rover’s tracks can be seen tracing the surface. The rover is in an area west of Jezero Crater that the science team is calling “Arbot.”
Credit: NASA Earth Observatory/Lauren Dauphin
Tuesday, 30 June 2026
In a remote part of northern Mauritania, on the Adrar Plateau, lies a desert landscape that appears to be shaped primarily by natural forces. The region's most eye-catching feature when seen from above is the Richat Structure—a large geologic formation made of concentric ridges on the eastern side of the plateau.
The 40-kilometer-wide structure was initially thought to be an impact crater. However, researchers later showed that it is actually a deeply eroded geologic dome formed by the uplift of rock above an underground igneous intrusion. Over time, differing erosion rates among rock types in the exposed upper dome led to the development of circular ridges known as cuestas. The orange and gray colors reflect differences in sedimentary and igneous rock types across the structure and the surrounding landscape.
Credit: JAXA
Wednesday, 1 July 2026
Taken by the Japanese spacecraft Hayabusa during its close approach in 2005, this very detailed view shows the strange peanut-shaped asteroid Itokawa. The 500-meter "rubble pile" asteroid features distinct smooth surface regions, such as the MUSES Sea. These areas are formed by seismic jostling that causes size segregation and erodes impact craters. By making exquisitely precise timing measurements using ESO’s New Technology Telescope, a team of astronomers has found that different parts of this asteroid have different densities.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute/CICLOPS
Thursday, 2 July 2026
This stunning false-color view of Saturn's moon Hyperion reveals crisp details across the strange, tumbling moon's surface. Color differences could indicate variations in the composition of surface materials. The view was obtained during Cassini's close flyby on Sept. 26, 2005.
Hyperion has a notably reddish tint when viewed in natural color. The red color was toned down in this false-color view, and the other hues were enhanced, in order to make more subtle color variations across Hyperion's surface more apparent.
Cassini scientists think that Hyperion’s unusual appearance can be attributed to its unusually low density for such a large object, which gives it weak surface gravity and high porosity. These characteristics help preserve the original shapes of Hyperion’s craters by limiting the amount of impact ejecta coating the moon’s surface. Impactors tend to make craters by compressing the surface material, rather than blasting it out. Further, Hyperion’s weak gravity and correspondingly low escape velocity mean that what little ejecta is produced has a good chance of escaping the moon altogether.
Credit: F. Kamphues, ESO/M. Kornmesser
Friday, 3 July 2026
This image shows satellites crossing the night sky above the northern Atacama Desert in Chile over just one hour. It is a stack of a time-lapse video taken on 15 October 2025 about two hours after sunset. A few streaks are caused by planes and can be easily identified by their blinking colored lights, but most trails are due to satellites.
In the foreground, we see the dome of ESO’s Extremely Large Telescope (ELT), the world’s largest optical/infrared telescope, currently under construction atop Cerro Armazones. Behind it we see the lasers of ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) at Paranal Observatory, 22 km away from the ELT.
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