NASA’s Psyche Mission Images the Crescent of Mars
This view of a crescent Mars was captured on May 15, 2026, at about 5:03 a.m. PDT by NASA’s Psyche mission as it approached the planet for a gravity assist. Captured by the spacecraft’s multispectral imager instrument, this was the last view of the whole planet before it began to overfill the field of view of the camera.
Because Psyche approached Mars from a high phase angle, the planet appeared as a thin crescent in the days running up to the close approach, lit by sunlight reflecting off its surface. In observations from the spacecraft’s multispectral imagers, the crescent appeared brighter and extended farther around the planet’s disk than anticipated because of the strong scattering of sunlight through the planet’s dusty atmosphere.
The image was acquired with Imager A. It has been processed into a natural-color view (approximating what the human eye would see) using red, green, and blue data from imager filters.
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