Mercurys Horizon from MESSENGER
21.01.2008

What would it look like to fly past Mercury? Just such an adventure was experienced last week by the MESSENGER spacecraft during its first flyby of the strange moon-like world nearest the Sun. Pictured above is the limb of Mercury seen by MESSENGER upon approach, from about 1 1/2 Earth diameters away.

Saturns Hyperion in Natural Color
14.05.2018

What lies at the bottom of Hyperion's strange craters? To help find out, the robot Cassini spacecraft now orbiting Saturn swooped past the sponge-textured moon in 2005 and 2010 and took images of unprecedented detail.

Shadows at the Lunar South Pole
23.04.2011

What is it? It's a multi-temporal illumination map, of course. To make it, the wide angle camera on the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft collected 1,700 images over a period of 6 lunar days (6 Earth months), repeatedly covering an area centered on the Moon's south pole.

Aristarchus Plateau
30.11.2007

Anchored in the vast lava flows of the Moon's Oceanus Procellarum lies the Aristarchus Plateau. The bright impact crater at the corner of the plateau is Aristarchus, a young crater 42 kilometers wide and 3 kilometers deep. Only slightly smaller, lava flooded Herodotus crater is above and to the left.

Ganymede: A Really Groovy Moon
11.07.1996

Ganymede's surface is a wrinkled mess. As large ice-sheets shift on the moon's surface, parts of the surface buckle causing high ridges, deep furrows, and parallel grooves. This photo, taken by the Galileo spacecraft currently orbiting Jupiter, was released yesterday. The large circular feature near the picture bottom is a large impact crater.

Mars Perseverance Sol 3
26.02.2021

Stitched together on planet Earth, 142 separate images make up this 360 degree panorama from the floor of Jezero Crater on Mars. The high-resolution color images were taken by the Perseverance rover's zoomable Mastcam-Z during mission sol 3, also known as February 21, 2021.

The Landscape on Comet Tempel 1
6.07.2005

This diverse landscape is the surface of comet Temple 1's nucleus as seen by the Deep Impact probe's Impactor Targeting Sensor. Within minutes of recording the rugged view, the landscape had changed dramatically though, as the impactor smashed into the surface near the two large, half kilometer-sized craters at picture center.

Tycho and Clavius
5.08.2021

South is up in this detailed telescopic view across the Moon's rugged southern highlands. Captured on July 20, the lunar landscape features the Moon's young and old, the large craters Tycho and Clavius.

Sedimentary Mars
15.08.2003

High-resolution imaging of an area in the Schiaparelli Basin of Mars on June 3 by the MGS Mars Orbiter camera produced this stunning example of layered formations within an old impact crater. On planet...

18 Miles From Deimos
22.12.1996

Diminutive Deimos is the smallest of the two tiny Moons of Mars. Potato shaped and barely 6 miles wide this asteroid-like body was visited by the Viking 2 orbiter in 1977. This image was made when the spacecraft approached to within 18 miles of Deimos' surface.