Marvel at the stunning images captured by spacecraft this year

NASA’s Juno spacecraft flew just 930 miles (1,500 kilometers) above the volcanic world Io this year. The otherworldly vistas, including a look at the most powerful volcano known to man, did not disappoint.

“They are truly stunning, stunning images,” Ashley Davies, a planetary scientist at the space agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, told Mashable.

Other space missions have captured intriguing images of Mars, the Moon, and beyond. Here are many of the impressive cosmic scenes from 2024, so far.

NASA craft takes close-up images of volcano-covered world

After flying past Jupiter’s tormented moon on Feb. 3, NASA’s Juno spacecraft sent back some of the closest views ever of the unique world. The agency’s deep space probe came within 930 miles of Io, following a similar pass in December. Planetary scientists hope the long-awaited flybys will answer fundamental questions about the mysterious, lava-spewing moon.

“The dual flybys are designed to provide new insights into the workings of Io’s volcanic engine and whether a global magma ocean exists beneath Io’s rocky, mountainous surface,” mission operators wrote after the first images came in.

Io is home to hundreds of volcanoes, many of which are active and hot enough to be observed by Juno on the lunar surface.

Unprecedented photo of largest volcano in our solar system

NASA has captured a comprehensive image of the largest volcano known to man.

The space agency used its 23-year-old Mars Odyssey orbiter to capture a never-before-seen view of Olympus Mons — a view similar to how astronauts in a hypothetical space station might see the giant mountain. It is 373 miles (600 kilometers) wide — about the size of Arizona — and 17 miles (27 kilometers) tall. That’s more than twice as high as commercial airliners fly.

“Normally we see Olympus Mons in narrow strips from above, but by turning the spacecraft toward the horizon, we can see just how big it is above the landscape in a single view,” Jeffrey Plaut, NASA’s Odyssey project scientist, said in a statement. “The image is not only spectacular, but it also provides us with unique science data.”

As you can see, it is not a sharp-pointed mountain, but a gradually sloping “shield volcano” similar to the Hawaiian volcanoes. It was formed by progressive lava flows, with thick oozing lava overlaying previous lava flows.

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Spacecraft approaches metal object zooming around Earth, takes images

In April, a spacecraft carefully approached and imaged a large piece of metal orbiting Earth, a step toward addressing humanity’s mounting problems with space debris.

The delicate space mission, carried out by Japanese satellite technology company Astroscale, used its ADRAS-J satellite to travel within a few hundred meters of an abandoned section of a non-communicative, decommissioned rocket, proving that the satellite could safely make observations at such a close distance.

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The mission is part of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s (JAXA, the Japanese equivalent of NASA) “Commercial Removal of Debris Demonstration” project, which is seeking a proven way to remove problematic space debris from Earth’s orbit. A collision with a large object can create thousands of more pieces of debris, setting off a domino effect of future impacts.

Mashable speed of light

US spacecraft takes pictures of aurora around Earth

In May 2024, Earth will be hit by a series of intense solar flares, the strongest since Halloween, more than 20 years ago.

While these active solar outbursts can pose serious threats to our power grid and communications systems, they also create dazzling events in our polar skies, commonly referred to as auroras or northern lights. In particular, our mid-sized star has recently been sending out a number of coronal mass ejections, or CMEs, which are bursts of superheated gas (plasma). “It’s like taking a piece of the sun and throwing it out into space,” Mark Miesch, a scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Space Weather Prediction Center, previously told Mashable.

When they collide with Earth, solar particles can get caught in our planet’s magnetic field, travel to the poles, and collide with molecules and particles in our atmosphere. These atmospheric particles then heat up and glow. Three U.S. weather satellites captured this dramatic event from the North Pole on May 11, revealing a glowing ring around areas where you normally don’t see the dancing lights.

“Multiple coronal mass ejections from the sun triggered an extreme geomagnetic storm around Earth last week, creating stunning auroras even in places where the northern lights are rarely seen,” NOAA’s National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service (NESDIS) explained when it released the above image. “The Southern Hemisphere also reported notable auroras from the storm.”

Lunar spacecraft lands upside down

Japan landed its SLIM spacecraft — short for Smart Lander for Investigating the Moon — on Jan. 19. About a week later, the Japan Space Agency (JAXA) released an image from the robotic lander (taken by a baseball-sized robot released before landing) showing why its solar panels weren’t generating electricity.

He landed upside down.

One of SLIM’s thrusters malfunctioned 50 meters (about 50 yards) above the lunar surface, resulting in the accident. Despite this, the craft still performed an unprecedented “pinpoint landing,” landing less than 100 meters (about 110 yards) from its intended target.

“The precise landing performance was evaluated to be approximately 10 meters or less, possibly 3 to 4 meters,” JAXA said in a statement.

NASA rover finds damaged helicopter in middle of Martian desert

After a rough landing this year, the damaged Ingenuity helicopter can no longer fly. NASA’s nearby Perseverance rover spotted the grounded alien helicopter alone in a Martian valley in early February 2024.

The NASA image below, edited and enhanced by geovisual designer Simeon Schmauß, highlights the desolation of extremely dry Mars, a desert planet that has largely lost its insulating atmosphere and 1,000 times drier than the driest desert on Earth.

Both the Perseverance rover and its former orbiter, Ingenuity, were on the hunt for the best places to look for evidence of life on Mars — if it ever existed. Now, the car-sized rover will hunt alone.

Before the accident, the Ingenuity craft was making history. The experimental robot was the first craft ever to make a powered, controlled flight on another planet. And it kept flying after that. Ingenuity flew on Mars a whopping 72 times — engineers initially hoped it would fly five times, if at all. It flew distances of up to 2,315 feet.

And it overcame a daunting flight challenge. Mars’ atmosphere is quite thin, about one percent of Earth’s. That makes it difficult to generate the lift needed for flight. To get airborne, Ingenuity spun its four-foot-long rotor blades at a blistering 2,400 revolutions per minute.

Crude Robotic American Moon Landing

Intuitive Machines’ Odysseus lunar lander broke a leg during its landing on the moon in February 2024. An onboard camera captured the dusty landing.

Although Odysseus’ landing wasn’t perfect, NASA, which provided $118 million for the commercial mission, hailed the challenging Feb. 22 landing as a success. Even in a compromised state, the lander returned scientific data from all of NASA’s equipment, including studies of space weather and interactions between the spacecraft’s plume and the moon’s chalky surface.

The mission is part of the space agency’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program, which selects companies to provide NASA missions to the moon. It frees the agency, already burdened with an ambitious timeline to return astronauts to the moon under the Artemis program, from the obligation to fully plan and fund missions that result in human landings. Such a crewed mission won’t happen before 2026.

The shadow of the lunar eclipse passing over the Earth

On April 8, 2024, millions of people in North America will witness a rare total solar eclipse, when the moon passes between the sun and Earth, casting a shadow on our planet.

For those on the relatively narrow path of totality, it’s an experience that can’t be overstated. “On a scale of one to 10, a partial solar eclipse is a seven,” Terry Virts, a former NASA astronaut who saw his first total solar eclipse (from Earth) in 2017, told Mashable. “And a total solar eclipse is a million.” (A partial solar eclipse is when only a portion of the sun is blocked by the moon — an interesting experience, but nothing compared to totality.)

This is what this harrowing event looked like from space, captured by an American scientific satellite.

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