NASA’s Psyche Mission Images the Crescent of Mars

This view of a crescent of Mars was captured on May 15, 2026 around 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, it was the last view of the entire planet before it began to fill the camera’s field of view.

Because Psyche approached Mars at a high phase angle, the planet appeared as a thin crescent in the days before its close approach, illuminated 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 expected due to strong scattering of sunlight through the planet’s dusty atmosphere.

The image was acquired with Imager A. It was transformed into a natural color view (approximately what the human eye would see) using red, green and blue data from the imager’s filters.

For more information about NASA’s Psyche mission, visit:

https://science.nasa.gov/mission/psyche/