Planetary Picture of the Day
Week of March 31, 2025
Another interesting rock discovered by Perseverance on Mars, a look back at a dangerous super typhoon, and two stunning new images from JWST.
Monday, 31 March 2025
Shocking Spherules
This image from NASA’s Mars Perseverance rover, a fusion-processed SuperCam Remote Micro-Imager (RMI) mosaic, shows part of the “St. Pauls Bay” target, acquired from the lower Witch Hazel Hill area of the Jezero crater rim. The image reveals hundreds of strange, spherical-shaped objects comprising the rock. Perseverance acquired this image on March 11, 2025.
Tuesday, 1 April 2025
The Power of Nature
Super Typhoon Trami was the twenty-fourth tropical storm and the tenth typhoon of 2018's annual storm season in the western Pacific. Wind speeds peaked at 260 km/h, the equivalent of a category 5 hurricane on NOAA's scale. ESA astronaut Alexander Gerst captured the eye of the massive storm from the International Space Station.
Wednesday, 2 April 2025
Jupiter in Infrared
This mind-boggling image of the largest planet in our solar system is courtesy of the James Webb Space Telescope. You can clearly see moons and rings as well. Jupiter's main ring was discovered in 1979 by NASA's passing Voyager 1 spacecraft, but its origin was then a mystery. Data from NASA's Galileo spacecraft, however, that orbited Jupiter from 1995 to 2003 confirmed the hypothesis that this ring was created by meteoroid impacts on small nearby moons.
Friday, 4 April 2025
HR 8799
NASA’s JWST has provided the clearest look yet at the iconic multi-planet system HR 8799. The observations detected carbon dioxide in each of the planets, which provides strong evidence that the system’s four giant planets formed, much like Jupiter and Saturn, by slowly building solid cores that attract gas from within a protoplanetary disk.
Colors are applied to filters from Webb’s NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera), revealing their intrinsic differences. A star symbol marks the location of the host star HR 8799, whose light has been blocked by a coronagraph.
The colors in this image, which represent different wavelengths captured by Webb’s NIRCam, tell researchers about the temperatures and composition of the planets. HR 8799 b, which orbits around 6.3 billion miles from the star, is the coldest of the bunch, and the richest in carbon dioxide. HR 8799 e orbits 1.5 billion miles from its star and likely formed closer to the host star, where there were stronger variations in the composition of the material.
In this image, the color blue is assigned to the 4.1-micron light, green to 4.3-micron light, and red to the 4.6-micron light.
