#PPOD: NASA's Psyche Images Earth 🌍 and Moon 🌖

That bright speck isn't a star – it's Earth! And the dot above it is the Moon. The Psyche mission captured this image from 290 million kilometers away while calibrating its cameras. The spacecraft is en route to a metal-rich asteroid between Mars and Jupiter.

Credit: NASA NASAJPL Caltech ASU

#PPOD: Saturn in Infrared 🪐

Saturn viewed at infrared wavelengths, as imaged by NASA's Cassini spacecraft in 2014. The hexagon at the top represents a giant jet stream, approximately 29,000 to 30,000 kilometers wide, with sides approximately 14,500 kilometers long – longer than Earth's diameter. This massive storm spans 75 to 300 kilometers high and is a long-lived atmospheric feature centered around Saturn's north pole.

Credit: NASA NASAJPL Caltech spacescienceins #CICLOPS; Processing: Maksim Kakitsev

#PPOD: Solar Cells ☀️

The National Science Foundation (NSF) Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope has captured the highest-resolution image of the Sun's surface ever recorded. The image, produced by the National Solar Observatory (NSO), reveals a turbulent, "boiling" pattern of gas covering our star. The "boiling" appearance consists of cell-like structures, each approximately the size of Texas, which are formed by convective currents that move heat from the Sun's interior to its surface. Hot plasma rises in the center of the cells and sinks in the dark lanes at the edges. Tiny, bright markers of magnetic fields are visible in the dark lanes. It is thought that these specks of light funnel energy into the corona, the Sun's outer atmosphere, which could explain its high temperature. This image was part of the Inouye Solar Telescope's first-light observations, and its high resolution allows for the viewing of features as small as 30 kilometers for the first time.

Credit: Inouye Solar Telescope, NatSolarObs AURADC NSF

#PPOD: Frosty Martian Dunes ❄️

These Martian dunes in Mars' northern hemisphere were captured from above by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter using its High-Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on Sept. 8, 2022. Scientists use such images to track the amount of frost that settles on the landforms and then disappears as the weather warms in spring.

Martian dunes migrate just like dunes on Earth, with wind blowing away sand on one side of the dune and building up on another. Recent research has shown that winter frost stops the movement of sand grains, locking the dunes in place until the spring thaw.

Credit: NASA NASAJPL Caltech UArizona

#PPOD: Mar­tian Win­ter Won­der­land ❄️

This sweeping view along a rusty red ridge and into a crater showcases the exquisite beauty of icy, layered terrain in the south polar region on Mars.

The High Resolution Stereo Imaging camera onboard ESA’s Mars Express captured this frosty scene in the Ultimi Scopuli region near the south pole of Mars on 19 May 2022. At this time, it was southern hemisphere spring, and ice was starting to retreat. Dark dunes began to peak through the frost, and the elevated terrain appears ice-free.

Credit: esa DLR en FU Berlin

#PPOD: The Eye of the Crater 👁️

A vast cavity on the Red Planet looks back at ESA TGO with an icy stare. The crater is located in Utopia Planitia, the largest known impact basin in the Solar System, with a diameter of roughly 3,300 km, or twice the size of Earth’s Sahara Desert from north to south.

This remnant of an ancient impact is just one of the many scars asteroids have inflicted upon the Red Planet. Water, volcanoes, and impacts from asteroids shaped the Martian surface in the ancient past. Mars is currently a cold, dry desert.

This view from CaSSIS shows a crater approximately eight kilometres in diameter with material ejected in a manner that scientists believe suggests the presence of water ice. When the asteroid hit this region of Mars, the water ice melted, and a mix of liquid water and dust rock was propelled from the top layers.

The smooth appearance of the crater is consistent with other features in the region, which have evidence of a water-ice history. Zooming into the crater, it is possible to see streaks on the walls of the crater, showing evidence of landslides, and ripples sculpted by the wind.

Credit: ESA/ TGO/CaSSIS

#PPOD: Deimos Before Sunrise 🌄

NASAPersevere captured this view of Deimos, the smaller of Mars' two moons, shining in the sky at 4:27 a.m. local time on March 1, 2025, the 1,433rd Martian day, or sol, of the mission. In the dark before dawn, the rover's left navigation camera used its maximum long-exposure time of 3.28 seconds to capture 16 individual shots, which were combined into a single image that was later sent to Earth. In total, the image represents an exposure time of about 52 seconds.

The low light and long exposures add digital noise, making the image hazy. Many of the white specks seen in the sky are likely noise; some may be cosmic rays. Two of the brightest white specks are Regulus and Algieba, stars that are part of the constellation Leo.

"Woodstock Crater," at center right, is roughly a half-mile (750 meters) away from the rover. At the time, Perseverance was en route to "Witch Hazel Hill."

Credit: NASA NASAJPL Caltech

#PPOD: Titan's Surface 🌕

The atmosphere of Titan, one of Saturn’s moons, appears similar to that on Earth about 3.5 billion years ago, before life appeared.

After a seven-year journey on board the Cassini spacecraft, ESA’s Huygens probe reached Titan’s surface, marking the most distant landing ever achieved by a spacecraft. During the descent, its cameras collected data on the dense atmosphere and took the first-ever images of the surface.

These revealed an extraordinary world with lakes, islands, and erosion features similar to those that shape our planet, confirming that liquid methane once flowed there. Methane on Titan is found in liquid form, not as a gas, due to the intense pressure and cold temperatures, about –180° C.

Credit: esa NASA

#PPOD: Curiosity Sends Holiday Postcard from #Mars 🌄

Team members working with NASA’s MarsCuriosity created this “postcard” by commanding the rover to take images at two times of day on Nov. 18, 2025, spanning the 4,722nd and 4,723rd Martian days, or sols, of the mission.

The panoramas were captured at 4:15 p.m. on Sol 4,722 and 8:20 a.m. on Sol 4,723 (both at local Mars time), then merged together. Color was later added for an artistic interpretation of the scene, with blue representing the morning panorama and yellow representing the afternoon one. The resulting “postcard” is similar to ones the rover took in June 2023 and November 2021. Adding color to these kinds of merged images helps different details stand out in the landscape.

Credit: NASA NASAJPL Caltech

#PPOD: Neptune 🔵

NASAVoyager 2 made its closest approach to #Neptune in 1989, flying by 4,950 km above its cloud tops. It is still the only spacecraft to have visited the planet! The mission revealed 6 new moons, rings, and geysers erupting from the moon Triton. This Voyager 2 image of Neptune, processed by Kevin Gill, was captured on Aug. 31, 1989.

Credit: NASA NASAJPL Caltech / Kevin M. Gill