Space Photos of the Week
A close-up look at the universe’s many wonders, from nearby planets to faraway galaxies.
- NASA/JPL-Caltech01Jupiter’s storms are truly dazzling. This tempest, rotating counter-clockwise, is located in the planet’s Northern hemisphere and is truly enormous—for scale, each pixel in this image is 4.2 miles across.
- ESA02Mars might no longer have active volcanoes, but the “stretch marks” visible in this photo are remnants of when volcanic activity pulled apart the planet’s crust. This region, known as Sirenum Fossae, is located in Mars’ southern hemisphere.
- ESO03Terraformers, take note: Scientists recently discovered Ross 128b, an Earth-like planet just 11 light years away. The small dot in the center of the image is the red dwarf star it orbits around.
- NASA04Tiny moon alert\! This image of Mars captures one of its moons, Phobos, mid-orbit. That repeating pattern of dots in the top left of the image is actually the small irregularly shaped moon in transit around Mars.
- ESO05COSMOS-Gr30 is a bizarre and complex cluster of 10 galaxies. The colorful space bubble stretches out three times as wide as our own Milky Way, making it the largest bubble of ionized gas ever discovered.
- NASA06Coronal holes like this one are openings in the sun where parts of the star’s magnetic field loop outward but don’t return. The highly charged particles flung from these holes collide with Earth at speeds averaging 900,000 mph, generating our famed polar auroras.
TopicsAMP Stories
Photoshopped NASA Photos Give New Life to Outer-Space Imagery
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Jakob Schiller
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These images—the first in a series of high-res shots NASA will release in the coming weeks—are the sharpest humans will ever see of Pluto's surface.
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The Gaia Space Telescope Just Changed How You See the Stars
The first star map from the ESA’s Gaia space telescope is poised to revolutionize our understanding of the Milky Way galaxy.
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The Year's Most Awesome Photos of Space
For nearly three years, we have been gathering the best, most interesting, most beautiful photographs of space we could find, delivering one of them to you each day. Here are 35 of our favorites among this year's bunch.
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Artemis II: Everything We Know as Its Crew Approaches the Far Side of the Moon
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The Trajectory of the Artemis II Moon Mission Is a Feat of Engineering
The astronauts will arrive about 10,300 kilometers beyond our satellite, breaking all previous records for distance from Earth. But how was their route chosen?
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The Future of the Artemis Program Is Riding on Reentry
Entire space programs have been canceled after a failure in the reentry phase. In the final test for Artemis II, astronauts will travel at 32 times the speed of sound as they return from the moon.
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How and When to Watch the Artemis II Mission’s Return to Earth
Splashdown for the Artemis II crew is scheduled for Friday evening, and NASA will livestream the historic homecoming.
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Artemis II Mission Launches Successfully
The crew of Artemis II will not descend to the moon, but their capsule will fly over the far side of its surface.
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5 Mysteries That the Artemis Missions to the Moon Could Finally Solve
The moon is not just a barren rock orbiting the Earth. The Artemis missions could answer the great unknowns that the satellite holds.
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The US Military’s GPS Software Is an $8 Billion Mess
The GPS Next-Generation Operational Control System was due for completion in 2016. Ten years later, the software for controlling the military’s GPS satellites still doesn’t work.
Stephen Clark, Ars Technica