Halley Dust, Mars Dust, and Milky Way
12.05.2023

Grains of cosmic dust streaked through night skies in early May. Swept up as planet Earth plowed through the debris streams left behind by periodic Comet Halley, the annual meteor shower is known as the Eta Aquarids. This year, the Eta Aquarids peak was visually hampered by May's bright Full Moon, though.

Layered Mars: An Ancient Water World
5.12.2000

Pictured above, layers upon layers stretch across the floor of West Candor Chasma within the immense martian Valles Marineris. Covering an area 1.5 by 2.9 kilometers, the full image from the Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft shows over 100 individual beds.

Mars in the Loop
9.08.2012

This composite of images spaced some 5 to 7 days apart from late October 2011 (top right) through early July 2012 (bottom left), traces the retrograde motion of ruddy-colored Mars through planet Earth's night sky.

The South Pole of Mars
13.12.2001

The south pole of Mars is the bright area near the center of the detailed, subtly shaded color image above. Recorded in September of this year by the Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) spacecraft, the picture shows a region surrounding the 400 kilometer wide martian polar cap in the midst of southern hemisphere spring.

Striped Sand Dunes on Mars
6.01.2021

Why are these sand dunes on Mars striped? No one is sure. The featured image shows striped dunes in Kunowsky Crater on Mars, photographed recently with the Mars Reconnaissance OrbiterБs HiRISE Camera. Many Martian dunes are known to be covered unevenly with carbon dioxide (dry ice) frost, creating patterns of light and dark areas.

Perseverance: Seven Minutes to Mars
16.02.2021

How hard is it to land safely on Mars? So hard that many more attempts have failed than succeeded. The next attempt will be on Thursday. The main problem is that the Martian atmosphere is too thick to ignore -- or it will melt your spacecraft.

InSights First Image from Mars
27.11.2018

Welcome to Mars, NASA Insight. Yesterday NASA's robotic spacecraft InSight made a dramatic landing on Mars after a six-month trek across the inner Solar System. Needing to brake from...

Curiosity Rover at Rocknest on Mars
27.12.2012

What's in this smooth soil on Mars? In late October, NASA's robotic Curiosity rover stopped near a place dubbed Rocknest as it continues to explore Gale Crater on Mars. Rocknest is the group of stones seen near the top left of the above image -- just to the left of Curiosity's mast.

Phobos: Doomed Moon of Mars
25.11.2018

This moon is doomed. Mars, the red planet named for the Roman god of war, has two tiny moons, Phobos and Deimos, whose names are derived from the Greek for Fear and Panic. The origin of the Martian moons is unknown, though, with a leading hypothesis holding that they are captured asteroids.

ISS Transits Mars
23.09.2020

Yes, but have you ever seen the space station do this? If you know when and where to look, watching the bright International Space Station (ISS) drift across your night sky is a fascinating sight -- but not very unusual.