Looks like NASA's Ingenuity Mars helicopter saw the Perseverance rover's tracks during its 40th flight on Jan. 19 #space #NASA #Mars

📷NASA/JPL-Caltech/edited by me

Extreme cat loafing

#cats

Tidal forces can cause the surface of Jupiter's moon Io to bulge up to 100 meters (330 feet).

On Earth, the biggest difference between low and high tide is 18 meters (60 feet), and this is for water, not a solid surface!

All of that stress makes Io the most volcanically active world in our solar system.

📷 NASA's New Horizons spacecraft, 2007. Credit NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI

NASA's Kennedy Space Center sits in the middle of the Merrit Island National Wildlife Refuge in Florida. This creates some interesting interactions between rockets and wildlife.

Here, an osprey perches in front of the Space Launch System moon rocket with Orion at the top.

📷 credit NASA/Keegan Barber

#NASA #space #spaceflight #bird #birds #photography #wildlife

Happy December solstice!

Here's what Earth looked like on June 21 (June solstice, left) vs. Dec. 20 (the day before December solstice, right).

Notice how North and South America trade places in the Sun! Our planet has an axial tilt of 23.4 degrees, which gives each hemisphere a turn in more direct sunlight during the year.

The images were taken by NASA's EPIC camera aboard the NOAA DSCOVR spacecraft located nearly 1 million miles away.

#NASA #space #Earth #solstice #wintersolstice

This may be the final image from NASA's InSight lander on Mars. The spacecraft's power levels are extremely low due to four years' worth of dust on the solar panels.

#NASA #space #spaceflight #Mars

I wrote a guide to the rings of our solar system and beyond! Saturn's rings are so young, they may have formed after the dinosaurs went extinct.

https://www.planetary.org/articles/rings-of-the-solar-system

#space #science #astronomy

Tomorrow is the 50th launch anniversary of the Apollo 17 Moon mission.

I love this pic of the landing site, Taurus-Littrow, captured by Gene Cernan from the Lunar Module on the orbit before he and Harrison Schmitt landed on Dec. 11, 1972. The Command and Service Module, with Ron Evans inside, is a speck in the center of the picture. The landing site is directly to the right of the CSM, among the small craters about halfway to the mountains.

Image credit: NASA

#Space #Moon #History