SPACE Exploration

Wildflowers in Bloom at Kennedy Space Center

With wildflowers surrounding the view, NASA's Space Launch System (SLS) Moon rocket carried atop the Crawler-Transporter 2 arrives at Launch Pad 39B at the agency's Kennedy Space Center in Florida on June 6, 2022.
The first in an increasingly complex series of missions, Artemis I will test the SLS rocket and Orion spacecraft as an integrated system prior to crewed flights to the Moon. Through Artemis, NASA will land the first woman and first person of color on the lunar surface, paving the way for a long-term lunar presence and using the Moon as a steppingstone before venturing to Mars.

Read more about the Artemis I mission.

Image Credit: NASA/Ben Smegelsky

Orion Spacecraft
Space Launch System (SLS)
Artemis Program

It's here – the deepest, sharpest infrared view of the universe to date: Webb's First Deep Field.

Previewed by President Joe Biden on July 11, the image shows us galaxies once invisible to us. The full set of full-color images and data from NASA's James Webb Space Telescope will be revealed July 12: nasa.gov/webbfirstimages

The Sparkle of Distant Galaxies

The brilliant cascade of stars through the middle of this image is the galaxy ESO 318-13 as seen by the Hubble Space Telescope in this image from 2012. Despite being located millions of light-years from Earth, the stars captured in this image are so bright and clear one could almost attempt to count them.
ESO 318-13 is sandwiched between a vast collection of bright celestial objects. Several stars near and far dazzle in comparison to the neat dusting contained within the galaxy. One that particularly stands out is located near the center of the image, and looks like an extremely bright star located within the galaxy. This is, however, a trick of perspective. The star is located in the Milky Way, our own galaxy, and it shines so brightly because it is so much closer to us than ESO 318-13.

There are also a number of tiny glowing disks scattered throughout the frame that are more distant galaxies. In the top right corner, an elliptical galaxy can be clearly seen, a galaxy which is much larger but more distant than ESO 318-13. Peeking through ESO 318-13, near the right-hand edge of the image, is a distant spiral galaxy.

Galaxies are largely made up of empty space; the stars within them only take up a small volume, and providing a galaxy is not too dusty, it can be largely transparent to light coming from the background. This makes overlapping galaxies like these quite common.

Image Credit: NASA/ESA/Hubble

When Galaxy Clusters Collide

There is a deep connection between some of the largest, most energetic events in the Universe and much smaller, weaker ones powered by our own Sun.
The results come from a long observation with NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory of Abell 2146, a pair of colliding galaxy clusters located about 2.8 billion light years from Earth.

Galaxy clusters contain hundreds of galaxies and huge amounts of hot gas and dark matter and are among the largest structures in the Universe. Collisions between galaxy clusters release enormous amounts of energy unlike anything witnessed since the big bang and provide scientists with physics laboratories that are unavailable here on Earth.

Learn more: Colossal Collisions Linked to Solar System Science

Image Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/Univ. of Nottingham/H. Russell et al.; Optical: NAOJ/Subaru

Artemis 1 is a planned uncrewed test flight for NASA's Artemis program. It is the first flight of the agency's Space Launch System super heavy-lift launch vehicle and the first flight of the Orion MPCV. As of May 2022, Artemis 1 is expected to launch no earlier than August 2022

Artemis I is the first in a series of increasingly complex missions that will enable human exploration to the Moon and Mars.

MILKYWAY - 📸 Shot by mobile phone

A close-up view of NASA's Artemis 1 Space Launch System megarocket inside the Vehicle Assembly Building at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Sept. 20, 2021. (Image credit: NASA/Frank Michaux)

An Expanse of Light

This gallery provides examples of the ways that different types of light from telescopes on the ground and in space can be combined. The common thread in each of these selections is data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, illustrating how X-rays — which are emitted by very hot and energetic processes — are found throughout the Universe.

R Aquarii:
This object is, in fact, a pair: a white dwarf star that steadily burns at a relatively cool temperature and a highly variable red giant. As they orbit each other, the white dwarf pulls material from the red giant onto its surface. Over time, enough of this material accumulates and triggers an explosion. Astronomers have seen such outbursts over recent decades. Evidence for much older outbursts is seen in the spectacular structures observed by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope (red and blue). X-ray data from Chandra (purple) shows how a jet from the white dwarf is striking material surrounding it and creating shock waves, similar to sonic booms from supersonic planes.

Cassiopeia A:
Chandra's observations of the Cassiopeia A supernova remnant have shown how individual elements from the exploded star are being cast off into space. In this image, X-rays reveal silicon (red), sulfur (yellow), calcium (green), and iron (light purple). The blue around the rim of the remnant reveals the blast wave from the explosion as it travels outward. This image also adds a layer of radio data of Cassiopeia A from the National Science Foundation's Karl Jansky Very Large Array (dark purple, blue, and white) and an optical image from Hubble (orange). Like X-rays, radio waves can pe*****te thick clouds of gas and dust that lie between Earth and Cassiopeia A, providing additional information about this famous stellar explosion.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ZXv-wWwa5H0

Countdown to the James Webb Space Telescope The James Webb Spce Telescope will launch about a week from today, and we're bringing the Towson University monthly planetarium show to you to talk about it....

Space Station Silhouette on the Moon

What's that unusual spot on the Moon? It's the International Space Station. Using precise timing, the Earth-orbiting space platform was photographed in front of a partially lit gibbous Moon last month. The featured composite, taken from Payson, Arizona, USA last month, was intricately composed by combining, in part, many 1/2000-second images from a video of the ISS crossing the Moon. A close inspection of this unusually crisp ISS silhouette will reveal the outlines of numerous solar panels and trusses. The bright crater Tycho is visible on the upper left, as well as comparatively rough, light colored terrain known as highlands, and relatively smooth, dark colored areas known as maria. On-line tools can tell you when the International Space Station will be visible from your area.

Image Credit & Copyright: Andrew McCarthy

Iridescent by Moonlight

In this snapshot from November 18, the Full Moon was not far from Earth's shadow. In skies over Sicily the brightest lunar phase was eclipsed by passing clouds though. The full moonlight was dimmed and momentarily diffracted by small but similar sized water droplets near the edges of the high thin clouds. The resulting iridescence shines with colors like a lunar corona. On that night, the Full Moon was also seen close to the Pleiades star cluster appearing at the lower left of the iridescent cloud bank. The stars of the Seven Sisters were soon to share the sky with a darker, reddened lunar disk.

Image Copyright: Marcella Giulia Pace

Photographing Mars

NASA's Curiosity Mars rover used its black-and-white navigation cameras to capture panoramas of this scene at two times of day. This was the view at 8:30 a.m. local Mars time on Nov. 16, 2021 (the 3,299th Martian day, or sol, of the mission) and again at 4:10 p.m. local Mars time. The two times of day provided contrasting lighting conditions that brought out a variety of landscape details.
Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Curiosity Mars Rover