June's best space pictures: Volcano eruption from orbit, SpaceX launch
Published 28 Jun 2019, 16:51 BST
On June 25, a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket blazed through the early morning skies above Cape Canaveral, Florida. Its payload—the U.S. Department of Defense's STP-2 mission—included NASA satellites, an experimental solar sail, and the cremated remains of more than 150 people.
Photograph by Zoe Thacker, U.S. Air ForceThis image reveals the dust and streaming magnetic fields that surround Sagittarius A*, the Milky Way's supermassive black hole. The magnetic data—presented at the American Astronomical Society's June 2019 meeting—was collected by SOFIA, a NASA-modified Boeing 747.
Composite Image by NASAThough NASA's Mars 2020 rover won't need a spacesuit, it'll be bringing some pieces of astronaut outerwear along. The calibration target for its SHERLOC instrument will include five samples of spacesuit material—the first ever to be flown to Mars—to test how they handle the red planet's environment.
Photograph by NASATurns out that the red planet also gets black and blue: This new false-color image from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter reveals a relatively fresh Martian impact crater. Scientists estimate that the impact occurred sometime between September 2016 and February 2019.
Photograh by NASA, JPL, University of ArizonaOn the morning of June 22, astronauts aboard the International Space Station took this photo of Raikoke, a remote volcano in the North Pacific Ocean's Kuril Islands. As it erupted, the volcano sent dust and gases high into the skies, creating this stunning scene.
The Swedish-ESO-Submillimetre Telescope sits under the breathtaking Chilean sky at the European Southern Observatory's La Silla Observatory. When it opened in 1987, the now-decommissioned telescope was the only one of its kind in the Southern Hemisphere.
Photograph by A. Ghizzi Panizza, EsoDepending on the wavelength used, you'll see different features of the Whirlpool galaxy. The left image, captured by the Kitt Peak National Observatory, shows the galaxy's veins of dust in visible light. The two images at right come from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, which sees the veins glowing in infared. The second image from the left shows the galaxy in combined infared and visible light.
Composite Image by NASA, JPL Cal-techOn June 13, technicians at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory installed wheels on the right side of the Mars 2020 rover.
Photograph by NASA, JPL Cal-techSince June 8, a huge wildfire has destroyed swaths of vegetation east of Phoenix, Arizona. Firefighters have tried to contain the blaze with air-dropped flame retardant—leaving red streaks that the European Space Agency's Copernicus Sentinel-2 satellite can see from orbit.
Photograph by EsaThis enhanced-color mosaic shows Daphnis, one of the moons in Saturn's rings, kicking up three waves on the edge of a ring gap. The image is part of a set collected by NASA's now-defunct Cassini spacecraft that reveals new details of Saturn's rings, scientists announced on June 14 in the journal Science.
Photograph by Image Mosaic by NASA, JPL Cal-tech, Space Science InstituteThis pink blob isn't a wad of bubble gum; it's the massive Coma galaxy cluster. New data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory show that, also unlike bubble gum, the cluster's hot gas isn't very viscous, or "sticky." The results were published June 17 in Nature Astronomy.
Image by NASAOn June 19, NASA's Curiosity Mars rover detected a 21-parts-per-billion methane spike, the largest it's ever seen. The short-lived gas excistes astrobiologists, since it is made by living and non-living processes. But as quickly as it appeared, the methane spike vanished.
Photograph by NASA, JPL Cal-tech