This image shows the first flash of sunlight reflected off a lake on Saturn’s moon Titan. The glint off a mirror-like surface is known as a specular reflection. This kind of glint was detected by the visual and infrared mapping spectrometer (VIMS) on NASA’s Ca... More »
Diagram depicting the passage of asteroid 2012 DA14 through the Earth-moon system on Feb. 15, 2013. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech The small near-Earth asteroid 2012 DA14 will pass very close to Earth on February 15, so close that it will pass inside the ring ... More »
Frances Arnold, a Caltech bio-engineer, will receive a National Medal of Technology and Innovation from President Barack Obama during an awards ceremony Friday morning in Washington D.C. Arnold will be getting the award for her achievements in synthetic biolog... More »
Storm Head, Meet Tail This set of images from NASA’s Cassini mission shows the evolution of a massive thunder-and-lightning storm that circled all the way around Saturn and fizzled when it ran into its own tail. The storm was first detected on Dec. 5, 2010. Th... More »
This artist’s illustration shows a planetary disk (left) that weighs the equivalent of 50 Jupiter-mass planets. It demonstrates a first-of-its-kind feat from astronomers using the Herschel space observatory. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech A star thought to h... More »
Artist’s rendering of NASA’s ISS-RapidScat instrument (inset), which will launch to the International Space Station in 2014 to measure ocean surface wind speed and direction and help improve weather forecasts, including hurricane monitoring. It will be install... More »
The percussion drill in the turret of tools at the end of the robotic arm of NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity has been positioned in contact with the rock surface in this image from the rover’s front Hazard-Avoidance Camera (Hazcam). Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech ... More »
The ring-like swirls of dust filling the Andromeda galaxy stand out colorfully in this new image from the Herschel Space Observatory, a European Space Agency mission with important NASA participation. Image credit: ESA/NASA/JPL-Caltech/NHSC Two new eye-catch... More »
The High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter snapped this series of pictures of sand dunes in the north polar region of Mars. The area covered in each of the five panels is about 0.8 mile (1.3 kilometers)... More »
This artist’s concept shows the Euclid spacecraft. The telescope will launch to an orbit around the sun-Earth Lagrange point L2. The Lagrange point is a location where the gravitational pull of two large masses, the sun and Earth in this case, precisely equals... More »
MAHLI’s First Night Imaging of Martian Rock, White Lighting This image of a Martian rock illuminated by white-light LEDs (light emitting diodes) is part of the first set of nighttime images taken by the Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI) camera at the end of the ro... More »
A full-scale model of the Curiosity Mars rover as well as ‘the first image of Mars’ will be on display at the Jan. 23 premier of ‘The Changing Face of Mars’ at Caltech’s Beckman Auditorium. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech Space enthusiasts will be able to get “... More »
