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Scientists with NASA's Mars 2020 mission and the European-Russian ExoMars mission traveled to the Australian Outback to hone their research techniques before their missions launch to the Red Planet in the summer of 2020 to search for signs of ancient life on Mars.

Team member Nelson Reginald examines the BITSE instrument in the lab where it was built, at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. BITSE is a coronagraph, a kind of telescope that blocks the Sun’s bright face in order to reveal its dimmer atmosphere.

This time series shows carbon monoxide associated with fires from the Amazon region in Brazil from Aug. 8-22, 2019. Made with data collected from the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) on NASA's Aqua satellite, the images map carbon monoxide at approximately 18,000 feet (5,500 meters) altitude. Each "day" in the series is made by averaging three day's-worth of measurements.

Amazonian Fires Continue Shrouding South America in Smoke

Figure caption. Example distributions of the first four velocity “moments” (called v, σ, h3 and h4 ) measured from the GMOS-N IFS data for two of the MASSIVE survey galaxies. For each galaxy, the top row shows two-dimensional maps, while the bottom row shows two-sided radial profiles from Gemini/GMOS-N (magenta circles) and McDonald Observatory (green squares) data.

Gran Canaria wildfire.

PanCam was developed in Britain by scientists from UCL’s Mullard Space Science Laboratory

This is a Hubble Space Telescope image of galaxy SDSS J1226+2152, which is being magnified and distorted by the immense gravity of a galaxy cluster in front of it. It is one of four distant, star-forming galaxies the TEMPLATES team will study with Webb. The team chose it as an example of a galaxy that is not very dusty.

The 2014 fires in Canada’s Northwest Territories burned more than 7 million acres of boreal forest, mainly comprised of cone-bearing trees like these jack pines. The fires released nearly 104 million tons of carbon into the atmosphere.