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NASA’s Juno spacecraft zipped just 930 miles (1,500 kilometers) above the volcanic world Io in 2024. The extraterrestrial vistas, including a view of the most powerful volcano known to humanity, didn’t disappoint.
“It’s absolutely stunning, stunning imagery,” Ashley Davies, a planetary scientist at the space agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, told Mashable.
Other space missions have captured intriguing views of Mars, the moon, and brilliant galaxies. Here are many of the impressive scenes captured this year as humanity reveals what’s happening in our solar system neighborhood, and beyond.
NASA craft snaps close images of volcano-covered world
Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / SwRI / MSSS / Jason Perry
After swooping by Jupiter’s tortured moon on Feb. 3, NASA‘s Juno spacecraft beamed back some of the closest-ever images of this unique world. The agency’s deep space probe came within just 930 miles of Io, following a similar pass in December 2023. Planetary scientists hope these much-anticipated flybys will answer fundamental questions about the mysterious, lava-spewing moon.
Io contains hundreds of volcanoes, many of which are active and hot enough for Juno to detect their heat on the moon’s surface.
Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / SwRI / MSSS / AndreaLuck / CC BY 3.0 Unported
Unprecedented photo of largest volcano in our solar system
Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / ASU
NASA captured an expansive view of the largest volcano known to humanity.
The space agency used its 23-year-old Mars Odyssey orbiter to capture a never-before-seen view of Olympus Mons — a vista similar to how astronauts in a hypothetical orbiting space station might view the behemoth mountain. It’s 373 miles (600 kilometers) wide — about the size of Arizona — and 17 miles (27 kilometers) tall. That’s over twice as high as commercial airliners fly.
“Normally we see Olympus Mons in narrow strips from above, but by turning the spacecraft toward the horizon we can see in a single image how large it looms over the landscape,” NASA’s Odyssey project scientist, Jeffrey Plaut, said in a statement. “Not only is the image spectacular, it also provides us with unique science data.”
As you can see, it’s not a sharply peaked mountain, but a gradually sloping “shield volcano,” similar to the Hawaiian volcanoes. It was formed by progressive lava flows, as thick oozing lava layered upon earlier lava flows.
Spacecraft approaches metal object zooming around Earth, snaps footage
A spacecraft carefully approached and imaged a large hunk of metal orbiting Earth in April — a step in tackling humanity’s mounting space junk woes.
The delicate space mission, undertaken by the Japanese satellite technology company Astroscale, used its ADRAS-J satellite to travel within several hundred meters of an abandoned section of a non-communicative, derelict rocket, proving it could safely observe in such close proximity.
Credit: Astroscale
The mission is part of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s (JAXA, which is Japan’s NASA counterpart) “Commercial Removal of Debris Demonstration” project, which seeks a proven way to remove problematic space junk from Earth’s orbit. A collision involving a large object can create thousands more pieces of debris, stoking a domino effect of future impacts.
By December, the ADRAS-J craft came within 15 meters (almost 50 feet) from the derelict rocket upper stage, part of JAXA’s H2A rocket, which launched the Earth observation GOSAT satellite in 2009.
The $82 million follow-up mission to capture the sizable piece of space junk, ADRAS-J2, is expected to launch in 2028.
U.S. spacecraft snap views of auroras encircling Earth
Credit: NOAA
A parade of intense solar storms hit Earth in May 2024 — the strongest since Halloween over 20 years ago.
While these outbursts from the active sun can pose serious threats to our electrical grid and communications systems, they also stoke brilliant events in our polar skies, commonly called auroras, or the northern lights. In particular, our medium-sized star recently emitted a number of coronal mass ejections, or CMEs, which are ejections of super hot gas (plasma). “It’s like scooping up a piece of the sun and ejecting it into space,” Mark Miesch, a scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Space Weather Prediction Center, previously told Mashable.
When they collide with Earth, solar particles can become trapped by our planet’s magnetic field, traveling to the poles and colliding with the molecules and particles in our atmosphere. Then, these atmospheric particles heat up and glow. Three U.S. weather satellites captured this dramatic event from above the North Pole on May 11, showing a glowing ring around places that don’t usually witness the dancing lights.
“Multiple coronal mass ejections from the sun sparked an extreme geomagnetic storm around the Earth last week, creating stunning auroras, even in places where the northern lights are rarely seen,” NOAA’s National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service (NESDIS) explained when it released the image above. “The Southern Hemisphere also reported remarkable auroras from the storm.”
Lunar spacecraft lands on its head
Credit: JAXA
Japan landed its SLIM spacecraft — short for Smart Lander for Investigating the Moon — on Jan. 19. About a week later, Japan’s space agency (JAXA) released an image of the robotic lander (taken by a baseball-sized robot released before landing), revealing why its solar panels failed to generate electricity.
One of SLIM’s thrusters malfunctioned 50 meters (around 50 yards) above the lunar surface, resulting in the mishap. Even so, the craft still demonstrated an unprecedented “pinpoint landing,” wherein it touched down under 100 meters (about 110 yards) from its intended target.
“The pinpoint landing performance was evaluated to be at approximately 10m or less, possibly about 3 – 4m,” JAXA said in a statement.
NASA rover finds damaged helicopter in middle of Mars desert
After a rough landing this year, the damaged Ingenuity helicopter can’t fly again. NASA’s nearby Perseverance rover spotted the grounded extraterrestrial chopper sitting alone in a valley on Mars in early February 2024.
The NASA image below, processed and enhanced by the geovisual designer Simeon Schmauß, underscores the desolation of profoundly arid Mars, a desert planet that’s largely lost its insulating atmosphere and is 1,000 times drier than the driest desert on Earth.
Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / ASU / Simeon Schmauß
Both the Perseverance rover and its former aerial scout, Ingenuity, had been searching for the best places to look for past evidence of Martian life — should any ever have existed. Now the car-sized rover will hunt alone.
Before its accident, the Ingenuity craft made history. The experimental robot was the first craft to ever make a powered, controlled flight on another planet. And then, it kept flying. Ingenuity flew on Mars a whopping 72 times — engineers initially hoped it might fly five times, if at all. It flew distances as far as 2,315 feet.
And it overcame a daunting flight challenge. The Martian atmosphere is quite thin, with a volume about one percent of Earth’s. This makes it difficult to generate the lift needed for flight. To take to the air, Ingenuity spun its four-foot rotor blades at a blazing 2,400 revolutions every minute.
Rough robotic U.S. moon landing
Credit: Intuitive Machines
Intuitive Machines’ Odysseus moon lander snapped a leg while landing on the moon in February 2024. An onboard camera caught the dusty touchdown.
While Odysseus’ landing wasn’t perfect, NASA, which provided $118 million for the commercial mission, hailed the challenging Feb. 22 touchdown as a success. Even in a compromised state, the lander beamed back scientific data from all of NASA’s equipment, which included research into space weather and interactions between the spacecraft’s plume and the moon’s chalky surface.
The mission is part of the space agency’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program, which picks companies to deliver NASA missions to the moon. This frees the agency, already burdened with an ambitious timeline to return astronauts to the moon under the Artemis program, from having to completely plan and fund missions leading up to human landings. Such a crewed mission won’t happen before 2026.
The moon’s eclipse shadow crossing over Earth
On April 8, 2024, millions of people in North America witnessed a rare total solar eclipse — when the moon passes in between the sun and Earth, casting a shadow on our planet.
For those in the relatively narrow path of totality, it’s an experience that cannot be overhyped. “On a scale of one to 10, a partial eclipse is a seven,” Terry Virts, a former NASA astronaut who experienced his first total eclipse (from down on Earth) in 2017, told Mashable. “And a total eclipse is a million.” (A partial eclipse is when just a portion of the sun is blocked by the moon — an interesting experience, but nothing like totality.)
Here’s how the poignant event looked from space, captured by a U.S. science satellite.
Webb telescope snapped photo of a huge world — in another solar system
Credit: NASA / ESA / CSA / STScI / E. Matthews (Max Planck Institute for Astronomy)
The James Webb Space Telescope achieved a rarity — snapping an image of a planet beyond our solar system.
The exoplanet, Epsilon Indi Ab, is located 12 light-years away. That’s trillions of miles, but right next door, cosmically speaking. The world is somewhat like the gas giant Jupiter, but twice as massive. (For reference, “If Earth were the size of a grape, Jupiter would be about as big as a basketball,” NASA notes.)
The Webb telescope, the most powerful space observatory ever built, used a coronagraph to capture the faint light from this far-off planet. A coronagraph blocks light from a specific star while capturing an image. This allows light from the nearby exoplanet to reach Webb.
“A star symbol marks the location of the host star Epsilon Indi A, whose light has been blocked by the coronagraph, resulting in the dark circle marked with a dashed white line,” the NASA said. The orange object is the gas giant Epsilon Indi Ab. Only a “few tens of exoplanets” have been directly imaged before.
Black hole shot a beam through space and NASA snapped stunning footage
Credit: NASA / ESA / STScI / Alec Lessing (Stanford University) / Mike Shara (AMNH) / Acknowledgment: Edward Baltz (Stanford University) // Image Processing: Joseph DePasquale (STScI)
The M87 galaxy is monstrous.
It contains several trillions of stars, compared to our Milky Way‘s hundreds of billions. And the supermassive black hole at its center is shooting an outstretched beam of energy into space. The Hubble Space Telescope, operated by NASA and the European Space Agency, has captured a new image of this energetic cosmic event, which produces a beam of superheated gas 3,000 light-years long (a single light-year is nearly 6 trillion miles).
NASA calls this jet “blowtorch-like,” and it seems to be triggering many stars near its trajectory to erupt.
“We don’t know what’s going on, but it’s just a very exciting finding,” Alec Lessing of Stanford University, who led the research into the finding, said in an agency statement. “This means there’s something missing from our understanding of how black hole jets interact with their surroundings.”
As the jet shoots through the galaxy, astronomers suspect it’s triggering a type of stellar explosion called a “nova.” These eruptions happen in double-star systems with an aging star — which is bloated and shedding its layers — and a white dwarf star, which is the hot core of a sun-like star that has shed its mass. The swollen star dumps material (hydrogen) on the white dwarf. “When the dwarf has tanked up a mile-deep surface layer of hydrogen that layer explodes like a giant nuclear bomb,” the agency explained. And then the gradual process renews.
NASA rover finds major surprise on Mars — and scientists are excited
Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / ASU / MSSS
NASA planetary scientists are excited.
“As a rock geek/scientist and as the Director of @NASAJPL — this is the kind of discovery you hope for — where mind-bending observations make your heart beat just a little faster,” NASA’s Laurie Leshin posted online in July.
The space agency’s Perseverance rover drilled into a Mars rock this summer where the six-wheeled robot had detected organic molecules (aka the “building blocks of life” as we know it). The robot collected a sample, and inside scientists spotted a telltale composition that suggests the potential of ancient microbial life. “The rock exhibits chemical signatures and structures that could possibly have been formed by life billions of years ago when the area being explored by the rover contained running water,” NASA said in a statement. But, crucially, much more research, over many years, is needed to confirm this possibility.
The image above shows the novel Martian structures NASA scientists observed in this rock. They’re white splotches surrounded by black halos dubbed “leopard spots.”
“These spots are a big surprise,” David Flannery, an astrobiologist at the Queensland University of Technology and member of the Perseverance science team, said in a statement. “On Earth, these types of features in rocks are often associated with the fossilized record of microbes living in the subsurface.”
Colliding galaxies
Credit: NASA / ESA / CSA / STScI
Millions of years ago, the spiral galaxies IC 2163 and NGC 2207 grazed each other, leaving this majestic, though warped, cosmic scene.
That’s IC 2163 on left, and the larger NGC 2207 on right. (Our Milky Way galaxy is a spiral, too.)
“The galaxies’ first pass may have also distorted their delicately curved arms, pulling out tidal extensions in several places,” NASA explained. “The diffuse, tiny spiral arms between IC 2163’s core and its far left arm may be an example of this activity. Even more tendrils look like they’re hanging between the galaxies’ cores. Another extension ‘drifts’ off the top of the larger galaxy, forming a thin, semi-transparent arm that practically runs off screen.”
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Spacecraft from NASA and other organizations captured rich imagery of our solar system in 2024, including views of Mars, Io, the moon, and Earth.
