SpaceShipOne
27.06.2003

Slung below its equally innovative mothership dubbed White Knight, SpaceShipOne rides above planet Earth, photographed during a recent flight test. SpaceShipOne was designed and built by cutting-edge aeronautical engineer Burt Rutan and his company Scaled Composites to compete for the X Prize.

Apollo 17 s Lunar Rover
5.06.2004

In December of 1972, Apollo 17 astronauts Eugene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt spent about 75 hours exploring the Moon's Taurus-Littrow valley while colleague Ronald Evans orbited overhead. Cernan and Schmitt were the last humans to walk or ride on the Moon - aided in their explorations by a Lunar Roving Vehicle.

Mercury Spotting
6.06.2004

Can you spot the planet? The diminutive disk of Mercury, the solar system's innermost planet, spent about five hours crossing in front of the enormous solar disk on 2003 May 7, as viewed from the general vicinity of planet Earth.

NGC 7822: Stars and Dust Pillars in Infrared
19.11.2017

Young stars themselves are clearing out their nursery in NGC 7822. Within the nebula, bright edges and complex dust sculptures dominate this detailed skyscape taken in infrared light by NASA's Wide Field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) satellite.

Io Eclipse Shadow on Jupiter from Juno
7.10.2019

What's that dark spot on Jupiter? It's the shadow of Jupiter's most volcanic moon Io. Since Jupiter shines predominantly by reflected sunlight, anything that blocks that light leaves a shadow. If you could somehow be in that shadow, you would see a total eclipse of the Sun by Io.

Unwrapped: Five Decade Old Lunar Selfie
27.09.2021

Here is one of the most famous pictures from the Moon -- but digitally reversed. Apollo 11 landed on the moon in 1969 and soon thereafter many pictures were taken, including an iconic picture of Buzz Aldrin taken by Neil Armstrong.

Water Found Around Nearby Star CW Leonis
16.07.2001

Do worlds outside our Solar System have oceans of water like Earth? An indication that such worlds might exist was bolstered recently by new evidence that nearby star system CW Leonis harbors water. Recent observations with the Submillimeter Wave Astronomy Satellite (SWAS) found significant detections of light at specific colors emitted by water.

A Year of New Perspectives
28.12.1999

Fittingly, 1999 saw a decade of astronomical discoveries to an end with portents of things to come - embodied in new spacecraft, telescopes, and perspectives to explore the distant Universe across the electromagnetic spectrum. X-ray astronomy in particular will likely flourish in coming

Beneath Jupiter's Clouds
23.01.1996

This near-infrared image of Jupiter was made using instrumentation at NASA's Infrared Telescope Facility, located on the summit of Mauna Kea, Hawaii, in support of the Galileo mission to Jupiter. The brightest spots...

Titan Landscape
17.01.2005

This color view from Titan gazes across a suddenly familiar but distant landscape on Saturn's largest moon. The scene was recorded by ESA's Huygens probe after a 2 1/2 hour descent through a thick atmosphere of nitrogen laced with methane.