Planetary Picture of the Day
Week of March 10, 2025
This week, we feature an amazing video and images of planets being awesome, with eclipses and aurorae.
Tuesday, 11 March 2025
Phobos and Deimos
Mars’ moons trade places in the sky! ESA released these images from its Mars Express orbiter a few months ago. They capture Mars' potato-shaped moons, Phobos and Deimos, as Phobos crosses in front of (or occults) Deimos. Two different versions are included: one where Deimos holds still and one where Phobos does. The real time of the frames is about one minute and nine seconds.
Wednesday, 12 March 2025
Dusty Martian Sun
NASA's Curiosity rover captured this image of the Sun through the dusty martian atmosphere in July 2018 while the dust storm that ended the Opportunity rover's mission was still raging. Curiosity was not affected by the decline in solar input because it is powered by a radioisotope thermoelectric generator (RTG).
Thursday, 13 March 2025
Saturn's Aurora
This was the first image of Saturn's ultraviolet aurora taken by the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS) on board the Hubble Space Telescope almost 30 years ago, when Saturn was a distance of 1.3 billion kilometers from Earth. The instrument, used as a camera, provided more than ten times the sensitivity of previous Hubble instruments in the ultraviolet. STIS images revealed exquisite detail never before seen in the spectacular auroral curtains of light that encircle Saturn’s north and south poles and rise more than a thousand miles above the cloud tops.
Friday, 14 March 2025
Diamond Ring for Firefly
Blue Ghost got her first diamond ring! The photo, taken at the landing site in the Moon’s Mare Crisium around 3:30 a.m. CDT on 14 March 2025, shows the Sun about to emerge from totality behind Earth. This marks the first time in history that a commercial company was actively operating on the Moon and able to observe a total solar eclipse, in which the Earth blocks the Sun and casts a shadow on the lunar surface. This phenomenon occurred simultaneously with the lunar eclipse we witnessed on Earth.
