A dust storm in Olympia Planum's north polar dune fields was triggered by a late Martian summer cold front. As the northern polar cap shrinks fast, it releases cold air that sometimes moves south, like on Earth. These cold fronts strengthen in late summer and early fall due to temperature differences. Occasionally, they cause big dust storms covering large areas or the whole planet. A similar event happened a month later, leading to a global dust storm lasting most of 2018. The image, taken on April 3, 2018, by the Mars Express HRSC camera during orbit, shows natural colors. [ see full image by Aster Cowart ]
Goodbye Ingenuity
Mission completed. Ingenuity is left alone on Mars after damage to one of its blades renders it inoperable..
The Green Light of Day
Image of tire tracks on Mars with an unusual green tone. . Taken by Perseverance on February 4th.
Hope for Mars
Nothing really. Just a gorgeous image of Mars from the UAE Hope mission.
Morning and Night on Mars
Yeah. Um… Wow. Nice Job NASA. I’ll just copy/paste how The Planetary Society explained it:
“NASA's Curiosity team made this artistic interpretation of the rover's view from high up Mt. Sharp by combining pictures taken at different times of day and adding colors to bring out the contrast. The first set of images was taken at 8:30 a.m local Mars time on Nov. 16, and the second set at 4:10 p.m. The morning light is highlighted in blue, while the afternoon is orange.”
China's Zhurong Mars Rover
How adorable is this. The Zhurong rover placed a camera on the ground, backed up and took a selfie next to the landing platform it emerged from last month.
We don’t post enough Mars Scenic Views
I mean… we don’t post enough in general.
Phobos over mount Sharp
Taken by the Curiosity rover. This is one of Mars tiny moons as seen from the ground. Impressive as it is only 14 long and you can actually see its shape from the surface. See Phobos below for reference.
Colorized View of Perseverance Landing
An artificially colorized view of Jezero Crater, showing the bird’s eye view of Perseverance screaming towards Mars’s surface. The above image was enhanced by Kevin Gill into full color, taking images captured by Perseverance’s Lander Vision System Camera just after the heat shield was released.
The First Ever Real-Time Video from Another Planet
When you watch this video, if you find yourself thinking of the Apollo moon landings— here is why: this is the first real-time video taken from another world since 1972, and this is the first ever taken on another planet.
Most “video” you see from other planetary missions are actually animations. Multiple image frames taken over long periods of time. Then someone registers the images to one another to smooth out the motion and then you have animated photographic video. Additionally, these seconds long clips are usually of events that actually took hours or even days to play out.
That being said, seeing the Martian surface move below in real time, the parachute deploying against an alien sky, and the rover being dropped to the surface from the Sky Crane is absolutely amazing. Perhaps my favorite moment is when the Sky Crane flies off behind a cloud of dust looks just like (and actually is) an alien spacecraft visiting an alien world.
Mars Panorama from Curiosity
This might be the prettiest Mars pan yet.
Mars. Just Saying.
Nothing to say here, except this is a pretty amazing pan.
Phobos Over Mars
Mars' inner moon Phobos appears far darker than the bright clouds of Mars in this view taken by the Indian Mars Orbiter Mission on October 14, 2014. Image by Emily Lakdawalla for Planetary Society.
Hellas Basin from Mars Express
Another one definitely worth clicking to see the full-resolution. Image by Justin Cowert and more information on his Flickr page.
Cyber Tuesday Spaceprobe Deal
For two days only, buy one of our limited edition Robotic Spacecraft Series Prints and get the full suite of vinyl stickers for free. This is a total savings of $24 and would serve as a great stocking stuffer to follow the presentation of the print.
A Curiosity Sunset on Mars
The first time we had one of these it was shot by Spirit in 2006 and then this one last year also by Curiosity.
Poster #3: Curiosity
All three designs are published for our Kickstarter project. Back us today and get this Curiosity poster, Voyager or Cassini (or all three) as large scale screen-printed posters.
A Martian Sunset by Curiosity
Even though this sunset lacks the tiny disc of the sun, this image beats the previous sunset image for my hard-earned-cash.
MOM is at Mars
You know how your Mother will always take the most predictable pictures at the holidays? Well, the Mars Orbiter Mission has done exactly that with it’s recent global image of Mars and it turns out to actually be quite a rare image. Despite so many probes being active at Mars at once, most are too close to the planet to be able to capture a full disc image like this.
It is also the first interplanetary space mission for the Indian Space Research Organization and is really just a technology demonstrator for the group. This makes India only the fourth space agency to reach Mars and quite an accomplishment to do so successfully on it’s first try. To provide context for that statement, here is a list of missions to Mars and all the ones listed in bold (most spectacularly) failed to reach their goals. So Wanderingspace is happy to welcome another active player to the field of planetary exploration.
Kickstarter Project Coming Oct 2
Our new Kickstarter campaign will be live in a few days. Above are a few of the celestial assets illustrated for the animation/video we are producing for the campaign page.