The Pilbara in northwestern Australia exposes some of the oldest rocks on Earth, over 3.6 billion years old. via NASA https://ift.tt/3ZLvjTi

It is one of the more unusual rocks yet found on Mars. Smaller than a penny, the rock has several appendages that make it look, to some, like a flower. Although it would be a major discovery if the rock was truly a fossilized ancient Martian flower, there are less spectacular — and currently preferred […]

These engineers developed and tested Space Launch System software that will tell the rocket how to operate for the first 8 minutes of Artemis during launch and ascent. via NASA https://ift.tt/bcjxELJ

Which moon is this? It’s Earth’s moon — but in inverted colors. Here, the pixel values corresponding to light and dark areas have been translated in reverse, or inverted, producing a false-color representation reminiscent of a black and white photographic negative. However, this is an inverted color image — where the muted colors of the […]

The LAMP mission hopes to understand an often overlooked kind of aurora, called a pulsating aurora, and to test a theory on what causes them. via NASA https://ift.tt/beyuFAT

Yes, but can you see the lion? A deep exposure shows the famous dark indentation that looks like a horse’s head, visible just left and below center, and known unsurprisingly as the Horsehead Nebula. The Horsehead Nebula (Barnard 33) is part of a vast complex of dark absorbing dust and bright glowing gas. To bring […]

This was a very unusual type of solar eclipse. Typically, it is the Earth’s Moon that eclipses the Sun. In 2012, though, the planet Venus took a turn. Like a solar eclipse by the Moon, the phase of Venus became a continually thinner crescent as Venus became increasingly better aligned with the Sun. Eventually the […]

From somewhere else in the Milky Way galaxy, Comet 2I/Borisov was just visiting the Solar System. Discovered by amateur astronomer Gennady Borisov on August 30, 2019, the first known interstellar comet is seen in these two Hubble Space Telescope images from November and December 2019. On the left, a distant background galaxy near the line-of-sight […]

In this undated image form the 1960s, Nancy Grace Roman sits in her office in NASA Headquarters. Roman was the first chief astronomer for NASA. via NASA https://ift.tt/tUvyBxZ

The Crab Nebula is cataloged as M1, the first object on Charles Messier’s famous list of things which are not comets. In fact, the Crab is now known to be a supernova remnant, expanding debris from massive star’s death explosion, witnessed on planet Earth in 1054 AD. This brave new image offers a 21st century […]