Photograph by NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS [NASA JPL Feb. 24, 2015] This self-portrait of NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover shows the vehicle at the “Mojave” site, where its drill collected the mission’s second taste of Mount Sharp. The scene combines dozens of images taken during January 2015 by the Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI) camera at the end…
February 11, 2015 marks five years in space for NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, which provides incredibly detailed images of the whole sun 24 hours a day. Capturing an image more than once per second, SDO has provided an unprecedentedly clear picture of how massive explosions on the sun grow and erupt ever since its…
Photograph by NASA/Barry Wilmore In this incredible photo we see spirals of lights bursting from Earth. The photo was taken from the International Space Station by astronaut Barry Wilmore, the commander of Expedition 42 and one of six astronauts currently on board. Expedition 42 has been on the ISS since September 2014 and will…
Photograph by NASA/Goddard/SDO An instrument on NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) captured its 100 millionth image of the sun. The instrument is the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly, or AIA, which uses four telescopes working parallel to gather eight images of the sun—cycling through 10 different wavelengths—every 12 seconds. This is a processed image of SDO…
It’s like photographing a beach and resolving individual grains of sand. NASA recently released the largest Hubble Space Telescope image ever assembled, displaying sweeping views of a portion of the Andromeda galaxy (M31). Though the galaxy is over 2 million light-years away, the Hubble telescope is powerful enough to resolve individual stars in a…
Photograph by NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA) Although NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has taken many breathtaking images of the universe, one snapshot stands out from the rest: the iconic view of the so-called “Pillars of Creation.” The jaw-dropping photo, taken in 1995, revealed never-before-seen details of three giant columns of cold…
NASA took its first major step towards a manned mission to Mars today with the successful launch and landing of its Orion spacecraft. Orion completed its first voyage to space, traveling farther than any spacecraft designed for astronauts has been in more than 40 years. Orion blazed into the morning sky at 7:05 a.m.…
During Expedition 40 in the summer of 2014, NASA astronauts Steve Swanson and Reid Wiseman — along with European Space Agency astronaut Alexander Gerst — explored the phenomenon of water surface tension in microgravity on the International Space Station. The crew “submerged” a sealed GoPro camera into a floating ball of water the size…
Brian Cox visits NASA’s Space Power Facility in Ohio to see what happens when a bowling ball and a feather are dropped together under the conditions of outer space. The facility is home to the largest vacuum chamber in the world. The clip is a preview from Human Universe: Episode 4 on BBC Two.…
Photograph by NASA In this incredible aerial photograph by NASA, we see an overhead view of the Sarychev Peak Volcano erupting on June 12, 2009. Sarychev Peak is a stratovolcano covering almost the entirety of Matua Island in the Kuril Islands of Russia. It is a young, highly symmetrical stratovolcanic cone. During this particular…