Planetary Picture of the Day
Week of October 4, 2021
Monday, October 4, 2021
Jupiter Blues
The Juno spacecraft captured this image when the spacecraft was only 18,906 kilometers from the tops of Jupiter’s clouds — that’s roughly as far as the distance between New York City and Perth, Australia. The color-enhanced image, which captures a cloud system in Jupiter’s northern hemisphere, was taken on Oct. 24, 2017 at 10:24 a.m. PDT (1:24 p.m. EDT) and performing its ninth close flyby of the gas giant planet.
Tuesday, October 5, 2021
Edited by Jason Major
Earth from Rosetta
Earth imaged by ESA's Rosetta spacecraft during its third flyby on Nov. 12, 2009 from a distance of about 633,000 km.
Wednesday, October 6, 2021
A Crater at the North Pole of Mars
This image of a crater near the North pole (84.335° N, 120.393° E) was taken by HiRISE on August 20th, 2008. What you see here is mostly dry ice (solid CO2) which accumulates at the poles seasonally. This was taken in northern summer, when the seasonal CO2 ice cap is thinning, revealing beautiful red material on this small crater's slopes. The width of this image is about 1 km.
Thursday, October 7, 2021
Image processing: Jason Major
Daphnis up close and personal in Saturn's rings
Daphnis is an inner satellite of Saturn a little under 8-km in diameter, which orbits inside the ~40 km-wide Keeler Gap near the outer edge of the A ring. This is a forced-perspective view made with image data captured by Cassini on January 16, 2017.
Friday, October 8, 2021
Jupiter's Great Red Spot
This image is a contemporary color mosaic of the Great Red Spot taken with the Voyager 1 spacecraft on March 5, 1979.
