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After NASA's Juno spacecraft successfully reached the planet Jupiter Monday, Google celebrated in the best way it knew how: With a cute cartoon Google Doodle.

After a stressful five-year journey to the planet Jupiter, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory announced Monday that Juno had made it safely into orbit around the gigantic planet. If its instruments are in good shape, the probe will eventually begin to take images of Jupiter and gather data that could potentially help us understand the history of the solar system.

Appropriately, the Google Doodle featured mini-cartoon scientists jumping and cheering at the news, as well as some celebratory emoji from the probe itself.

Congratulations, humanity. We can build spacecrafts that travel to distant words as well as endearing emoji.

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Google is mining photos from a satellite launched in 2013 to create a better, cloud-free image of Earth from above.

The newest mosaic is an updated version of one produced in 2013. The new version was pieced together mostly using data from the Landsat 8 satellite, launched by NASA, which snaps "twice as many images as Landsat 7 does every day," according to Google.

"This new rendition of Earth uses the most recent data available — mostly from Landsat 8 — making it our freshest global mosaic to date," Chris Herwig, program manager for Google Earth Engine wrote in a blog post. 

Much of Earth is usually covered by clouds, but Google Maps combed through photo after photo to piece together the "clearest pixels" from more than 700 trillion pixels. The result is an unobstructed view of the Earth's surface with more details visible than before. 

"Our previous mosaic used imagery from Landsat 7 only, which at the time was the best imagery of its kind," Herwig said. "Unfortunately, Landsat 7 images captured after 2003 were affected by a hardware failure, resulting in large diagonal gaps of missing data."

Scientists can glean a lot from this kind of data, getting a sense of deforestation and urban development in different parts of the world.

Much of this data is freely available from the Landsat program, which has been imaging Earth's surface with various satellites since 1972. 

Landsat 8 is the newest satellite in the fleet.

You can explore the cloud-free imagery yourself either using Google Earth or through the satellite layer on Google Maps.

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Space tourism isn't affordable yet, but that doesn't mean you can't catch a glimpse of what it's like to be aboard the International Space Station (ISS).

On Thursday afternoon, NASA posted a 360-degree Facebook feature captured on the ISS, allowing the user to twist and turn from a fixed vantage point in the ISS. Click through the image below to get the full experience.

While not a totally immersive experience, the feature gives the viewer a pretty good idea of how cramped things are on the ISS and how astronauts have to deal with the economy of space, figuring out how to stash equipment in a Tetris-expert fashion.

The view in the feature is a little outdated, as the person with the camera perched in the window, Italian astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti, returned from her mission aboard the ISS a year ago. 

Still, it's a fun experience to tide space fans over until NASA gives us a 360-degree video or VR experience or even a lifetime pass aboard the station itself. 

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Space tourism isn't affordable yet, but that doesn't mean you can't catch a glimpse of what it's like to be aboard the International Space Station (ISS).

On Thursday afternoon, NASA posted a 360-degree Facebook feature captured on the ISS, allowing the user to twist and turn from a fixed vantage point in the ISS. Click through the image below to get the full experience.

While not a totally immersive experience, the feature gives the viewer a pretty good idea of how cramped things are on the ISS and how astronauts have to deal with the economy of space, figuring out how to stash equipment in a Tetris-expert fashion.

The view in the feature is a little outdated, as the person with the camera perched in the window, Italian astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti, returned from her mission aboard the ISS a year ago. 

Still, it's a fun experience to tide space fans over until NASA gives us a 360-degree video or VR experience or even a lifetime pass aboard the station itself. 

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Saying "there's no way I can pull this off" to lower expectations is the oldest trick in the book, but SpaceX just used it masterfully. The company managed to land the first stage of its Falcon 9 rocket on a drone ship at sea for the second time, despite previously saying a successful landing was "unlikely."

This is due to the rocket's re-entry into the Earth's atmosphere being much faster (and, thus, hotter) than on the first successful attempt in April. 

The Falcon 9, which was launched at 1:21 a.m. ET Friday, carried a Japanese communications satellite called JCSAT-14 into Earth's orbit. That part of the mission was also a success, with the second stage of Falcon 9 delivering JCSAT-14 into orbit about an hour after launch. 

Prior to the landing, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said the odds of making a successful landing are "maybe even." 

All in all, this is the sixth attempt by SpaceX to land the Falcon 9 on a drone ship in the ocean, the last two of which were successful. The landings are important as they give SpaceX the opportunity to reuse the Falcon 9 rockets, significantly reducing the cost of launching to space. 

On Twitter, Musk drops a hint on why this mission might be even more important than the first successful drone landing. 

This means that the rocket can safely slow down very quickly after a fast entry into the atmosphere. Though Musk does not explicitly mention this, the ability to slow down a spacecraft quickly would come in handy in a Mars landing, which is problematic as the planet's thin atmosphere would do a bad job slowing a spaceship down during a landing attempt. 

In April, Musk tweeted that the company plans to send its Red Dragon spacecraft to Mars in 2018. Unlike earlier Mars landing missions, Red Dragon is designed to land without a parachute, instead using SpaceX's SuperDraco thrusters to slow the craft down during landing. 

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