Space Photos This Week: Sun Plume, Moon Lander

Ice Tongue, Before It Took a Licking

Image courtesy ESA

Shown in a 2007 satellite image released this week by the European Space Agency, a floating ice tongue extends roughly a hundred miles (160 kilometers) off Antarctica's Mertz Glacier as the Luxembourg-size iceberg B9B floats nearby.

On February 12 or 13, 2010, the 60-mile-long (97-kilometer-long) B9B smashed into the tongue—creating a second, 48-mile-long (78-kilometer-long) iceberg, according to the Antarctic Climate and Ecosystems Cooperative Research Centre. (See pictures of this epic iceberg smashup.)

Published March 10, 2010

A Mighty Wind

Image courtesy NASA/CXC/MIT, STScI, and NSF/NRAO/VLA

One of the nearest and brightest galaxies containing a rapidly growing supermassive black hole is seen in a composite image released March 3, 2010.

The galaxy's red swirls represent x-ray data from the Chandra X-ray Observatory. Green shows optical data from the Hubble Space Telescope, and blue at the galaxy's core represents radio data from the Very Large Array in New Mexico.

The combined picture shows that a strong wind is being generated by hot gases rapidly pulled toward the black hole. This wind is flying away from the center of the galaxy, dubbed NGC 1068, at a rate of about a million miles (1.6 million kilometers) an hour.

Published March 10, 2010

Huygens on Titan

Image courtesy ESA

The size of a small car, the European Space Agency's Huygens probe sits on the surface of Saturn's moon Titan, still attached to its landing parachute, in an artist's rendering.

Huygens touched down on Titan in 2005 and sent back pictures of the hazy moon for 90 minutes before running out of battery power. This picture, released March 8, 2010, is based on images from the probe.

Published March 10, 2010

Inverted Crater on Mars

Image courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona

It might look like an oddly circular iceberg in the Antarctic Ocean. But this is actually a crater turned inside-out by time in the Arabia Terra region of Mars.

Scientists think such inverted craters form when an impact basin fills with sediment and the material around that sediment gets eroded away.

NASA released the false-color, high-resolution picture March 3, 2010, to commemorate a milestone for the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter: the collection of a hundred trillion bits of data on the red planet. The camera that snapped this shot on January 29, known as HiRISE, is one of six instruments aboard the Mars-orbiting craft.

Published March 10, 2010