Mars arrivals and Etna eruption — February's best science images
The month’s sharpest science shots, selected by Nature's photo team.
Hope’s arrival. This is the first photo of Mars taken by the United Arab Emirates’ Hope spacecraft after it successfully entered Martian orbit on 9 February. The shot was snapped from an altitude of 24,700 kilometres above the red planet’s surface. Hope, now in an elliptical holding orbit while engineers test and commission its instruments, is ready to move into the ‘science orbit’ — from which the craft will begin its mission in earnest in mid-May. This wide elliptical orbit will allow Hope’s instruments to observe every geographical region of Mars, at every time of day, once every 9 days, to create a global map of Martian weather.
Credit: MBRSC/UAE Space Agency/CU-LASP/EMM-EXI
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Martian landing. NASA’s Perseverance rover touched down safely in Mars’s Jezero Crater on 18 February. After whizzing through the planet’s thin atmosphere, the craft deployed a parachute to slow itself down. In a final landing manoeuvre, a ‘sky crane’ holding the rover fired rockets to gently lower the six-wheeled, car-sized Perseverance to the surface. This otherworldly photo, taken from the surface of Mars, shows the underside of the sky crane. The mission’s goal is to collect rock samples that might hold evidence of past Martian life. It will then leave those samples at certain spots on the ground where future spacecraft can retrieve them.
Into orbit. China’s spacecraft, Tianwen-1, arrived at Mars on 10 February, the day after Hope. This video, made by compiling images taken every 3 seconds by an on-board camera, shows the craft passing Mars as it enters orbit. In a few weeks’ time, Tianwen-1 will drop a lander and rover to the planet’s surface. Between them, the orbiter and rover will explore the geology and soil characteristics of Mars, including a search for water and ice.
Turtle rescue. Thousands of sea turtles were brought ashore on Texas’s South Padre Island after plummeting temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico left the animals ‘cold stunned’ — a state where they are conscious but paralysed and unable to move or feed properly. Efforts by members of public as well as game wardens, whose boat PV Murchison (pictured) carried around 150 stunned turtles to safety, resulted in the rescue of nearly 5,000 turtles. They were temporarily kept at the headquarters of conservation organization Sea Turtle, Inc and a nearby convention centre, where they could gradually warm up. It was the largest cold-stunning event on record in the United States.
Credit: Simon Brown
Credit: Simon Brown
Wreck site. The SS Thistlegorm was a British Merchant Navy ship that was bombed and sunk in the Red Sea during the Second World War. Photographer Simon Brown captured this image of the wreck in 15,005 frames, each adjusted to give a ‘straight down’ view before being tagged with GPS data and merged with the others. The photo won the Royal Photographic Society’s 2020 Science Photographer of the Year competition. Divers often visit the wreck, and it is slowly becoming part of the local coral reef.
Credit: D. Finch et al./Nat. Hum. Behav.
Cave kangaroo. This 17,000-year-old depiction of a kangaroo is Australia’s oldest-known rock painting. The 2-metre-high drawing in red ochre was found on the ceiling of a rock shelter in the Kimberley region, which is known for Indigenous rock art. Geoscientist Damien Finch at the University of Melbourne, Australia, and his colleagues calculated the radiocarbon dates of ancient mud-wasp nests surrounding the painting, which showed that it was between 17,100 and 17,500 years old.
Credit: D. Finch et al./Nat. Hum. Behav.
Credit: Fabrizio Villa/Getty
Credit: Fabrizio Villa/Getty
Fiery fountain. The eruption of Sicily’s Mount Etna — Europe’s most active volcano — led to some spectacular views as fountains of hot lava lit up the landscape. Etna began spewing ash, smoke and lava in mid-February, but volcanologists say this period of activity is unlikely to cause serious damage or injury. In this night-time shot of a church in Catania, Italy, forked rivers of lava can be seen pouring out of the crater more than 25 kilometres away.
Credit: J. Martin and E. Olson, Northland College; from Olson et al. 2021, Scientific Reports
Credit: J. Martin and E. Olson, Northland College; from Olson et al. 2021, Scientific Reports
Pink hare. Researchers have discovered that the South African springhare (Pedetes capensis) fluoresces hot pink under ultraviolet light. The animals join wombats and platypuses in an expanding gang of creatures that glow. But the springhare’s striking patterning and intense colour — described in Scientific Reports on 18 February — is unique among known biofluorescent mammals, and its function remains a mystery.