Space

Hubble’s Majestic Spiral in Pegasus



This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image shows a spiral galaxy known as NGC 7331.

In this view, Saturn's icy moon Rhea passes in front of Titan as seen by NASA's Cassini spacecraft. Some of the differences between the two large moons are readily apparent. While Rhea is a heavily-cratered, airless world, Titan's nitrogen-rich atmosphere is even thicker than Earth's.

This natural color image was taken in visible light with the Cassini narrow-angle camera on Nov. 19, 2009, at a distance of approximately 713,300 miles (1,148,000 kilometers) from Rhea. The Cassini spacecraft ended its mission on Sept. 15, 2017.

(Feb. 6, 2018) --- The Caspian Sea is pictured below the International Space Station as it orbited 253 miles above Earth's surface. The station's robotic arm (left) and solar arrays (right) are seen in the foreground.

anl90 wrote: »

The thought of outer space both terrifies and intrigues me. The idea of all that vast open nothingness freaks me out and gives me anxiety, while the thought of other life out there interests me.

The good news is this as far as nothingness goes:





The bad news is that if life exists out there (which is probable) then it exists so far away we will never be able to travel that far with what we know about physics today. Not to mention if we could even see that far, we would be seeing millions of years in the past and would have no idea what would happen for millions of years.

December 2006: Constructing the Space Station



NASA astronaut Robert Curbeam works on the International Space Station's S1 truss during the space shuttle Discovery's STS-116 mission in Dec. 2006.

A Lunar Tribute to Former NASA Chief Exploration Scientist



Lunar crater is named after NASA’s former chief exploration scientist, Michael Wargo. Wargo Crater is an 8.6-mile (13.8 km) diameter impact crater sitting on the northwest edge of Joule T crater, on the far side of the Moon. Wargo worked at NASA from 1991 until his death in 2013.

This is an image of the Cartwheel Galaxy taken with the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope.

Jupiter’s Swirling Cloud Formations



See swirling cloud formations in the northern area of Jupiter's north temperate belt in this new view taken by NASA’s Juno spacecraft.

New Day for Longest-Working Mars Rover



NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity recorded the dawn of the rover's 4,999th Martian day, or sol, with its Panoramic Camera (Pancam) on Feb. 15, 2018, yielding this processed, approximately true-color scene.

The view looks across Endeavour Crater, which is about 14 miles (22 kilometers) in diameter, from the inner slope of the crater's western rim. Opportunity has driven a little over 28.02 miles (45.1 kilometers) since it landed in the Meridiani Planum region of Mars in January, 2004, for what was planned as a 90-sol mission.

A sol lasts about 40 minutes longer than an Earth day.

This view combines three separate Pancam exposures taken through filters centered on wavelengths of 601 microns (red), 535 microns (green) and 482 microns (blue). It was processed at Texas A&M University to correct for some of the oversaturation and glare, though it still includes some artifacts from pointing a camera with a dusty lens at the Sun.

The processing includes radiometric correction, interpolation to fill in gaps in the data caused by saturation due to Sun's brightness, and warping the red and blue images to undo the effects of time passing between each of the exposures through different filters.