Swift Launches
22.11.2004

Where do gamma ray bursts occur? To help find out, NASA launched the Swift satellite on Saturday, as pictured above. What Swift is designed to do better than any previous satellite is to quickly locate these enigmatic explosions in both sky position and distance.

Launch of the IXPE Observatory
22.12.2021

Birds don't fly this high. Airplanes don't go this fast. The Statue of Liberty weighs less. No species other than human can even comprehend what is going on, nor could any human just a millennium ago. The launch of a rocket bound for space is an event that inspires awe and challenges description.

Launch of the Solar Orbiter
11.02.2020

How does weather on the Sun affect humanity? To help find out, the European Space Agency (ESA) and NASA have just launched the Solar Orbiter. This Sun-circling robotic spaceship will monitor...

Falcon 9 Boostback
12.03.2020

Short star trails appear in this single 84 second long exposure, taken on March 6 from a rotating planet. The remarkable scene also captures the flight of a Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon cargo spacecraft over Cape Canaveral Air Force Station shortly after launch, on a resupply mission bound for the International Space Station.

SpaceX Demo-2 Launch
13.06.2020

Clouds are white but the sky is dark in this snapshot of Launch Complex 39A at the Kennedy Space Center. The dramatic daytime sky is partly due to the black and white photo captured with a digital camera at near-infrared wavelengths. Taken at 3:22 p.m.

Salt Water Remnants on Ceres
1.09.2020

Does Ceres have underground pockets of water? Ceres, the largest asteroid in the asteroid belt, was thought to be composed of rock and ice. At the same time, Ceres was known to have unusual bright spots on its surface. These bright spots were clearly imaged during Dawn's exciting approach in 2015.

Tianwen 1 Mission to Mars
25.07.2020

On July 23, this Long March 5 heavy-lift rocket rose into a blue morning sky from China's Hainan Island Wenchang Satellite Launch Center. The rocket carried an orbiter, lander, and rover to ask Heavenly Questions on the ambitious Tianwen-1 mission to Mars.

Mars 2020 from 5,000 Feet
31.07.2020

On Thursday this snapshot from a small plane 5,000 feet above Florida's Space Coast caught a rocket's trail rising into the blue morning sky. It was July's third launch of a mission from planet Earth bound for Mars.

Launch of the Parker Solar Probe
15.08.2018

When is the best time to launch a probe to the Sun? The now historic answer -- which is not a joke because this really happened this past weekend -- was at night. Night, not only...

Dawn s Early Light, Rocket s Red Glare
4.07.2018

If you saw the dawn's early light from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station last Friday, June 29, then you could have seen this rocket's red glare. The single 277-second long exposure, made...