NASA's Europa Clipper spacecraft, en route to Jupiter's icy ocean moon Europa, recently captured a ghostly infrared portrait of Mars — a cosmic photo op that helped scientists fine-tune an instrument destined to investigate whether Europa can support life as we know it.
The image, a blurry composite of more than a thousand grayscale snapshots later colorized by scientists, was taken during a precision flyby of Mars on March 1, 2025. At its closest point, the spacecraft skimmed just 550 miles (884 kilometers) above the Martian surface, in a maneuver known as a gravity assist, which used the Red Planet's gravitational pull to slow the spacecraft and adjust its orbit around the sun ahead of a crucial leg of its nearly 2-billion-mile (3.2 billion km) journey to Jupiter.
