Sol 5 Postcard from Mars
9.01.2004

A martian Sol - the average martian solar day - is about 39 minutes longer than Earth's familiar 24 hour day. Operating on martian time, the Spirit rover recently sent back this color postcard image, recorded on Sol 5 of its stay on the martian surface.

APOD: 2004 August 28- M17: A Hubble Close-Up
28.08.2004

Sculpted by stellar winds and radiation, these fantastic, undulating shapes lie within the stellar nursery known as M17, the Omega Nebula, some 5,500 light-years away in the nebula-rich constellation Sagittarius. The lumpy features...

Saturns Iapetus: Moon with a Strange Surface
1.02.2005

What has happened to Saturn's moon Iapetus? A strange ridge crosses the moon near the equator, visible near the bottom of the above image, making Iapetus appear similar to the pit of a peach. Half of Iapetus is so dark that it can nearly disappear when viewed from Earth.

Inside Victoria Crater on Mars
17.09.2007

NASA's Opportunity rover is now inside Victoria Crater on Mars. Last week the robot rolled about 20 meters into the largest crater any Martian rover has yet encountered, the crater next to which Opportunity has been perched for months.

Vanishing Act
21.06.2008

Compare these two close-up pictures taken on sol 20 (left) and sol 24 of a trench dug in the Martian surface by NASA's Phoenix Lander. Those sols of the Phoenix Mission (a sol is a Martian day), correspond to June 15 and 18 on planet Earth.

Space Shuttle Rising
24.05.2015

What's that rising from the clouds? The space shuttle. Sometimes, if you looked out the window of an airplane at just the right place and time, you could have seen something very unusual -- a space shuttle launching to orbit.

Moon Rocket
20.07.1999

On July 20, 1969, only four days after leaving planet Earth 250,000 miles behind them, Apollo 11 astronauts landed on the moon - the first humans to reach another celestial body. But the Saturn...

Lunar Dust and Duct Tape
10.11.2001

Why is the Moon dusty? On Earth, rocks are weathered by wind and water, creating soil and sand. On the Moon, the long history of micrometeorite bombardment has blasted away at the rocky surface creating a layer of powdery lunar soil or regolith. This lunar regolith could be a scientific and industrial bonanza.

The International Space Station Expands Again
3.11.2002

The developing International Space Station (ISS) has changed its appearance yet again. Last month the Space Shuttle Atlantis visited the ISS and installed the third of eleven pieces that will compose the Integrated Truss Structure. The new S-1 Truss is visible on the right, below the extended solar panels across the top.

Spiral Galaxies in Collision
21.11.2004

Billions of years from now, only one of these two galaxies will remain. Until then, spiral galaxies NGC 2207 and IC 2163 will slowly pull each other apart, creating tides of matter, sheets of shocked gas, lanes of dark dust, bursts of star formation, and streams of cast-away stars.