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By NASA
Arsia Mons, an ancient Martian volcano, was captured before dawn on May 2, 2025, by NASA’s 2001 Mars Odyssey orbiter while the spacecraft was studying the Red Planet’s atmosphere, which appears here as a greenish haze.NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU The 2001 Odyssey spacecraft captured a first-of-its-kind look at Arsia Mons, which dwarfs Earth’s tallest volcanoes.
A new panorama from NASA’s 2001 Mars Odyssey orbiter shows one of the Red Planet’s biggest volcanoes, Arsia Mons, poking through a canopy of clouds just before dawn. Arsia Mons and two other volcanoes form what is known as the Tharsis Montes, or Tharsis Mountains, which are often surrounded by water ice clouds (as opposed to Mars’ equally common carbon dioxide clouds), especially in the early morning. This panorama marks the first time one of the volcanoes has been imaged on the planet’s horizon, offering the same perspective of Mars that astronauts have of the Earth when they peer down from the International Space Station.
Launched in 2001, Odyssey is the longest-running mission orbiting another planet, and this new panorama represents the kind of science the orbiter began pursuing in 2023, when it captured the first of its now four high-altitude images of the Martian horizon. To get them, the spacecraft rotates 90 degrees while in orbit so that its camera, built to study the Martian surface, can snap the image.
Arsia Mons is the southernmost of the three volcanoes that make up Tharsis Montes, shown in the center of this cropped topographic map of Mars. Olympus Mons, the solar system’s largest volcano, is at upper left. The western end of Valles Marineris begins cutting its wide swath across the planet at lower right.NASA/JPL-Caltech The angle allows scientists to see dust and water ice cloud layers, while the series of images enables them to observe changes over the course of seasons.
“We’re seeing some really significant seasonal differences in these horizon images,” said planetary scientist Michael D. Smith of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “It’s giving us new clues to how Mars’ atmosphere evolves over time.”
Understanding Mars’ clouds is particularly important for understanding the planet’s weather and how phenomena like dust storms occur. That information, in turn, can benefit future missions, including entry, descent and landing operations.
Volcanic Giants
While these images focus on the upper atmosphere, the Odyssey team has tried to include interesting surface features in them, as well. In Odyssey’s latest horizon image, captured on May 2, Arsia Mons stands 12 miles (20 kilometers) high, roughly twice as tall as Earth’s largest volcano, Mauna Loa, which rises 6 miles (9 kilometers) above the seafloor.
The southernmost of the Tharsis volcanoes, Arsia Mons is the cloudiest of the three. The clouds form when air expands as it blows up the sides of the mountain and then rapidly cools. They are especially thick when Mars is farthest from the Sun, a period called aphelion. The band of clouds that forms across the planet’s equator at this time of year is called the aphelion cloud belt, and it’s on proud display in Odyssey’s new panorama.
“We picked Arsia Mons hoping we would see the summit poke above the early morning clouds. And it didn’t disappoint,” said Jonathon Hill of Arizona State University in Tempe, operations lead for Odyssey’s camera, called the Thermal Emission Imaging System, or THEMIS.
The THEMIS camera can view Mars in both visible and infrared light. The latter allows scientists to identify areas of the subsurface that contain water ice, which could be used by the first astronauts to land on Mars. The camera can also image Mars’ tiny moons, Phobos and Deimos, allowing scientists to analyze their surface composition.
More About Odyssey
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of Caltech in Pasadena, California, manages the Mars Odyssey Project for the agency’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington as part of NASA’s Mars Exploration Program portfolio. Lockheed Martin Space in Denver built the spacecraft and collaborates with JPL on mission operations. THEMIS was built and is operated by Arizona State University in Tempe.
For more about Odyssey:
https://science.nasa.gov/mission/odyssey/
News Media Contacts
Andrew Good
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
818-393-2433
andrew.c.good@jpl.nasa.gov
Karen Fox / Molly Wasser
NASA Headquarters, Washington
202-358-1600
karen.c.fox@nasa.gov / molly.l.wasser@nasa.gov
2025-077
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Last Updated Jun 06, 2025 Related Terms
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By NASA
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Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater)
Chaitén Volcano in southern Chile erupted on May 2, 2008 for the first time inn 9,000 years. NASA satellites that monitor changes in vegetation near volcanoes could aid in earlier eruption warnings.Jeff Schmaltz, MODIS Rapid Response Team, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Scientists know that changing tree leaves can indicate when a nearby volcano is becoming more active and might erupt. In a new collaboration between NASA and the Smithsonian Institution, scientists now believe they can detect these changes from space.
As volcanic magma ascends through the Earth’s crust, it releases carbon dioxide and other gases which rise to the surface. Trees that take up the carbon dioxide become greener and more lush. These changes are visible in images from NASA satellites such as Landsat 8, along with airborne instruments flown as part of the Airborne Validation Unified Experiment: Land to Ocean (AVUELO).
Ten percent of the world’s population lives in areas susceptible to volcanic hazards. People who live or work within a few miles of an eruption face dangers that include ejected rock, dust, and surges of hot, toxic gases. Further away, people and property are susceptible to mudslides, ashfalls, and tsunamis that can follow volcanic blasts. There’s no way to prevent volcanic eruptions, which makes the early signs of volcanic activity crucial for public safety. According to the U.S. Geological Survey, NASA’s Landsat mission partner, the United States is one of the world’s most volcanically active countries.
Carbon dioxide released by rising magma bubbles up and heats a pool of water in Costa Rica near the Rincón de LaVieja volcano. Increases in volcanic gases could be a sign that a volcano is becoming more active.Josh Fisher/Chapman University When magma rises underground before an eruption, it releases gases, including carbon dioxide and sulfur dioxide. The sulfur compounds are readily detectable from orbit. But the volcanic carbon dioxide emissions that precede sulfur dioxide emissions – and provide one of the earliest indications that a volcano is no longer dormant – are difficult to distinguish from space.
The remote detection of carbon dioxide greening of vegetation potentially gives scientists another tool — along with seismic waves and changes in ground height—to get a clear idea of what’s going on underneath the volcano. “Volcano early warning systems exist,” said volcanologist Florian Schwandner, chief of the Earth Science Division at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley, who had teamed up with Fisher and Bogue a decade ago. “The aim here is to make them better and make them earlier.”
“Volcanoes emit a lot of carbon dioxide,” said volcanologist Robert Bogue of McGill University in Montreal, but there’s so much existing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that it’s often hard to measure the volcanic carbon dioxide specifically. While major eruptions can expel enough carbon dioxide to be measurable from space with sensors like NASA’s Orbiting Carbon Observatory 2, detecting these much fainter advanced warning signals has remained elusive. “A volcano emitting the modest amounts of carbon dioxide that might presage an eruption isn’t going to show up in satellite imagery,” he added.
Gregory Goldsmith from Chapman University launches a slingshot into the forest canopy to install a carbon dioxide sensor in the canopy of a Costa Rican rainforest near the Rincón de LaVieja volcano.Josh Fisher/Chapman University Because of this, scientists must trek to volcanoes to measure carbon dioxide directly. However, many of the roughly 1,350 potentially active volcanoes worldwide are in remote locations or challenging mountainous terrain. That makes monitoring carbon dioxide at these sites labor-intensive, expensive, and sometimes dangerous.
Volcanologists like Bogue have joined forces with botanists and climate scientists to look at trees to monitor volcanic activity. “The whole idea is to find something that we could measure instead of carbon dioxide directly,” Bogue said, “to give us a proxy to detect changes in volcano emissions.”
“There are plenty of satellites we can use to do this kind of analysis,” said volcanologist Nicole Guinn of the University of Houston. She has compared images collected with Landsat 8, NASA’s Terra satellite, ESA’s (European Space Agency) Sentinel-2, and other Earth-observing satellites to monitor trees around the Mount Etna volcano on the coast of Sicily. Guinn’s study is the first to show a strong correlation between tree leaf color and magma-generated carbon dioxide.
Confirming accuracy on the ground that validates the satellite imagery is a challenge that climate scientist Josh Fisher of Chapman University is tackling with surveys of trees around volcanoes. During the March 2025 Airborne Validation Unified Experiment: Land to Ocean mission with NASA and the Smithsonian Institution scientists deployed a spectrometer on a research plane to analyze the colors of plant life in Panama and Costa Rica.
Alexandria Pivovaroff of Occidental College measures photosynthesis in leaves extracted from trees exposed to elevated levels of carbon dioxide near a volcano in Costa Rica.Josh Fisher/Chapman University Fisher directed a group of investigators who collected leaf samples from trees near the active Rincon de la Vieja volcano in Costa Rica while also measuring carbon dioxide levels. “Our research is a two-way interdisciplinary intersection between ecology and volcanology,” Fisher said. “We’re interested not only in tree responses to volcanic carbon dioxide as an early warning of eruption, but also in how much the trees are able to take up, as a window into the future of the Earth when all of Earth’s trees are exposed to high levels of carbon dioxide.”
Relying on trees as proxies for volcanic carbon dioxide has its limitations. Many volcanoes feature climates that don’t support enough trees for satellites to image. In some forested environments, trees that respond differently to changing carbon dioxide levels. And fires, changing weather conditions, and plant diseases can complicate the interpretation of satellite data on volcanic gases.
Chapman University visiting professor Gaku Yokoyama checks on the leaf-measuring instrumentation at a field site near the Rincón de LaVieja volcano.Josh Fisher/Chapman University Still, Schwandner has witnessed the potential benefits of volcanic carbon dioxide observations first-hand. He led a team that upgraded the monitoring network at Mayon volcano in the Philippines to include carbon dioxide and sulfur dioxide sensors. In December 2017, government researchers in the Philippines used this system to detect signs of an impending eruption and advocated for mass evacuations of the area around the volcano. Over 56,000 people were safely evacuated before a massive eruption began on January 23, 2018. As a result of the early warnings, there were no casualties.
Using satellites to monitor trees around volcanoes would give scientists earlier insights into more volcanoes and offer earlier warnings of future eruptions. “There’s not one signal from volcanoes that’s a silver bullet,” Schwandner said. “And tracking the effects of volcanic carbon dioxide on trees will not be a silver bullet. But it will be something that could change the game.”
By James Riordon
NASA’s Earth Science News Team
Media contact: Elizabeth Vlock
NASA Headquarters
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James R. Riordon
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Last Updated May 15, 2025 LocationAmes Research Center Related Terms
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Hubble Space Telescope Home NASA’s Hubble Sees a… Hubble Space Telescope Hubble Home Overview About Hubble The History of Hubble Hubble Timeline Why Have a Telescope in Space? Hubble by the Numbers At the Museum FAQs Impact & Benefits Hubble’s Impact & Benefits Science Impacts Cultural Impact Technology Benefits Impact on Human Spaceflight Astro Community Impacts Science Hubble Science Science Themes Science Highlights Science Behind Discoveries Hubble’s Partners in Science Universe Uncovered Explore the Night Sky Observatory Hubble Observatory Hubble Design Mission Operations Missions to Hubble Hubble vs Webb Team Hubble Team Career Aspirations Hubble Astronauts News Hubble News Hubble News Archive Social Media Media Resources Multimedia Multimedia Images Videos Sonifications Podcasts E-books Lithographs Fact Sheets Glossary Posters Hubble on the NASA App More Online Activities 3 Min Read NASA’s Hubble Sees a Stellar Volcano
NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope captures a spectacular view the star R Aquarii. Credits:
NASA, ESA, Matthias Stute , Margarita Karovska , Davide De Martin (ESA/Hubble), Mahdi Zamani (ESA/Hubble) NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has provided a dramatic and colorful close-up look at one of the most rambunctious stars in our galaxy, weaving a huge spiral pattern among the stars.
Located approximately 700 light-years away, a binary star system called R Aquarii undergoes violent eruptions that blast out huge filaments of glowing gas. The twisted stellar outflows make the region look like a lawn sprinkler gone berserk. This dramatically demonstrates how the universe redistributes the products of nuclear energy that form deep inside stars and jet back into space.
R Aquarii belongs to a class of double stars called symbiotic stars. The primary star is an aging red giant and its companion is a compact burned-out star known as a white dwarf. The red giant primary star is classified as a Mira variable that is over 400 times larger than our Sun. The bloated monster star pulsates, changes temperature, and varies in brightness by a factor of 750 times over a roughly 390-day period. At its peak the star is blinding at nearly 5,000 times our Sun’s brightness.
This NASA Hubble Space Telescope image features the binary star system R Aquarii. NASA, ESA, Matthias Stute , Margarita Karovska , Davide De Martin (ESA/Hubble), Mahdi Zamani (ESA/Hubble) When the white dwarf star swings closest to the red giant along its 44-year orbital period, it gravitationally siphons off hydrogen gas. This material accumulates on the dwarf star’s surface until it undergoes spontaneous nuclear fusion, making that surface explode like a gigantic hydrogen bomb. After the outburst, the fueling cycle begins again.
This outburst ejects geyser-like filaments shooting out from the core, forming weird loops and trails as the plasma emerges in streamers. The plasma is twisted by the force of the explosion and channeled upwards and outwards by strong magnetic fields. The outflow appears to bend back on itself into a spiral pattern. The plasma is shooting into space over 1 million miles per hour – fast enough to travel from Earth to the Moon in 15 minutes! The filaments are glowing in visible light because they are energized by blistering radiation from the stellar duo.
Hubble first observed the star in 1990. R Aquarii was resolved into two very bright stars separated by about 1.6 billion miles. The ESA/Hubble team now has made a unique timelapse of R Aquarii’s dynamic behavior, from observations spanning from 2014 to 2023. Across the five images, the rapid and dramatic evolution of the binary star and its surrounding nebula can be seen. The binary star dims and brightens due to strong pulsations in the red giant star.
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This video features five frames spanning from 2014 to 2023 of R Aquarii. These frames show the brightness of the central binary changing over time due to strong pulsations in the red giant star. The central structures spiral outward due to their interaction with material previously ejected by the binary. This timelapse highlights the value of Hubble’s high resolution optical observations in the changing universe, known as time-domain astronomy. NASA, ESA, Matthias Stute , Margarita Karovska , Davide De Martin , Mahdi Zamani , N. Bartmann (ESA/Hubble) The scale of the event is extraordinary even in astronomical terms. Space-blasted material can be traced out to at least 248 billion miles from the stars, or 24 times our solar system’s diameter. Images like these and more from Hubble are expected to revolutionize our ideas about such unique stellar “volcanoes” as R Aquarii.
The Hubble Space Telescope has been operating for over three decades and continues to make ground-breaking discoveries that shape our fundamental understanding of the universe. Hubble is a project of international cooperation between NASA and ESA (European Space Agency). NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, manages the telescope and mission operations. Lockheed Martin Space, based in Denver, Colorado, also supports mission operations at Goddard. The Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, conducts Hubble science operations for NASA.
Facebook logo @NASAHubble @NASAHubble Instagram logo @NASAHubble Media Contact:
Claire Andreoli
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD
claire.andreoli@nasa.gov
Ray Villard
Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, MD
Bethany Downer
ESA/Hubble
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Last Updated Oct 16, 2024 Editor Andrea Gianopoulos Location NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Related Terms
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NASA’s 2001 Mars Odyssey orbiter captured this single image of Olympus Mons, the tallest volcano in the solar system, on March 11, 2024. Besides providing an unprecedented view of the volcano, the image helps scientists study different layers of material in the atmosphere, including clouds and dust.NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU The 23-year-old orbiter is taking images that offer horizon-wide views of the Red Planet similar to what astronauts aboard the International Space Station see over Earth.
NASA’s longest-lived Mars robot is about to mark a new milestone on June 30: 100,000 trips around the Red Planet since launching 23 years ago. During that time, the 2001 Mars Odyssey orbiter has been mapping minerals and ice across the Martian surface, identifying landing sites for future missions, and relaying data to Earth from NASA’s rovers and landers.
Scientists recently used the orbiter’s camera to take a stunning new image of Olympus Mons, the tallest volcano in the solar system. The image is part of a continuing effort by the Odyssey team to provide high-altitude views of the planet’s horizon. (The first of these views was published in late 2023.) Similar to the perspective of Earth astronauts get aboard the International Space Station, the view enables scientists to learn more about clouds and airborne dust at Mars.
Taken on March 11, the most recent horizon image captures Olympus Mons in all its glory. With a base that sprawls across 373 miles (600 kilometers), the shield volcano rises to a height of 17 miles (27 kilometers).
“Normally we see Olympus Mons in narrow strips from above, but by turning the spacecraft toward the horizon we can see in a single image how large it looms over the landscape,” said Odyssey’s project scientist, Jeffrey Plaut of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, which manages the mission. “Not only is the image spectacular, it also provides us with unique science data.”
In addition to offering a freeze frame of clouds and dust, such images, when taken across many seasons, can give scientists a more detailed understanding of the Martian atmosphere.
This infographic highlights just how much data and how many images NASA’s 2001 Mars Odyssey orbiter has collected in its 23 years of operation around the Red Planet.NASA/JPL-Caltech A bluish-white band at the bottom of the atmosphere hints at how much dust was present at this location during early fall, a period when dust storms typically start kicking up. The purplish layer above that was likely due to a mixture of the planet’s red dust with some bluish water-ice clouds. Finally, toward the top of the image, a blue-green layer can be seen where water-ice clouds reach up about 31 miles (50 kilometers) into the sky.
How They Took the Picture
Named after Arthur C. Clarke’s classic science-fiction novel “2001: A Space Odyssey,” the orbiter captured the scene with a heat-sensitive camera called the Thermal Emission Imaging System, or THEMIS, which Arizona State University in Tempe built and operates. But because the camera is meant to look down at the surface, getting a horizon shot takes extra planning.
By firing thrusters located around the spacecraft, Odyssey can point THEMIS at different parts of the surface or even slowly roll over to view Mars’ tiny moons, Phobos and Deimos.
The recent horizon imaging was conceived as an experiment many years ago during the landings of NASA’s Phoenix mission in 2008 and Curiosity rover in 2012. As with other Mars landings before and after those missions touched down, Odyssey played an important role relaying data as the spacecraft barreled toward the surface.
Laura Kerber, deputy project scientist for NASA’s Mars Odyssey orbiter, explains how and why the spacecraft in May 2023 captured a view of the Red Planet similar to the International Space Station’s view of Earth.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech To relay their vital engineering data to Earth, Odyssey’s antenna had to be aimed toward the newly arriving spacecraft and their landing ellipses. Scientists were intrigued when they noticed that positioning Odyssey’s antenna for the task meant that THEMIS would be pointed at the planet’s horizon.
“We just decided to turn the camera on and see how it looked,” said Odyssey’s mission operations spacecraft engineer, Steve Sanders of Lockheed Martin Space in Denver. Lockheed Martin built Odyssey and helps conduct day-to-day operations alongside the mission leads at JPL. “Based on those experiments, we designed a sequence that keeps THEMIS’ field-of-view centered on the horizon as we go around the planet.”
The Secret to a Long Space Odyssey
What’s Odyssey secret to being the longest continually active mission in orbit around a planet other than Earth?
“Physics does a lot of the hard work for us,” Sanders said. “But it’s the subtleties we have to manage again and again.”
These variables include fuel, solar power, and temperature. To ensure Odyssey uses its fuel (hydrazine gas) sparingly, engineers have to calculate how much is left since the spacecraft doesn’t have a fuel gauge. Odyssey relies on solar power to operate its instruments and electronics. This power varies when the spacecraft disappears behind Mars for about 15 minutes per orbit. And temperatures need to stay balanced for all of Odyssey’s instruments to work properly.
“It takes careful monitoring to keep a mission going this long while maintaining a historical timeline of scientific planning and execution — and innovative engineering practices,” said Odyssey’s project manager, Joseph Hunt of JPL. “We’re looking forward to collecting more great science in the years ahead.”
More about Odyssey:
https://science.nasa.gov/mission/odyssey/
News Media Contacts
Andrew Good
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
818-393-2433
andrew.c.good@jpl.nasa.gov
Karen Fox / Charles Blue
NASA Headquarters, Washington
202-358-1600 / 202-802-5345
karen.c.fox@nasa.gov / charles.e.blue@nasa.gov
2024-092
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Last Updated Jun 27, 2024 Related Terms
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By European Space Agency
Mars has some of the most impressive volcanoes in the Solar System. ESA’s Mars Express has now imaged the pitted, fissured flank of the planet’s second-tallest: Ascraeus Mons.
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