Category Astronomy/Space

This rare overhead shot of the James Webb Space Telescope shows the nine primary flight mirrors installed on the telescope structure in a clean room at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/Chris Gunn

X-ray jets from the galaxy Pictoris A. The greyscale image was taken by the Chandra X-ray Observatory and reveals the detailed X-ray structure of the jets, which extend over nearly one million light-years. The red contours show the radio emission. Astronomers analyzing these and other data have concluded that the X-ray emission is produced by rapidly moving charged particles in magnetic fields. Credit: NASA/Chandra, Hardcastle et al.

Curiosity took the photos for this panorama shortly after arriving at the lee face of Namib dune, on sol 1197 (December 19, 2015). For the first time since landing on Mars, the panorama taken by the rover’s left Mastcam includes the entire deck of the rover, permitting a rover self-portrait. Since Mastcam is on the mast, the self-portrait does not include the rover mast, but, unlike previous self-portraits taken with the MAHLI camera, it does contain the arm. The deck was included to look for sand grains that may have been carried onto the deck of the rover from the sand dune. For a 360-degree virtual reality version of this panorama, visit Andrew Bodrov’s 360cities page. Credit: NASA / JPL / MSSS / Andrew Bodrov Read more at: http://phys...

Figure 1: A simplified schematic of the how the LEISA instrument works. As the scene (in this case, Pluto) moves by along the scan direction, the imager records many frames of video in sequence, imaging each part of Pluto though each segment of the linear filter and building up a spectral map of the entire object. Credits: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI/Alex Parker