This Halloween, take a tour with NASA’s Exoplanet Exploration site of some of the most terrifying destinations in our galaxy. The nightmare world of HD 189733 b is the killer you never see coming. To the human eye, this far-off planet looks bright blue. But any space traveler confusing it with the friendly skies of […]
The Soyuz MS-01 spacecraft is seen as it lands with Expedition 49 crew members NASA astronaut Kate Rubins, Russian cosmonaut Anatoly Ivanishin of Roscosmos, and astronaut Takuya Onishi of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) near the town of Zhezkazgan, Kazakhstan on Sunday, Oct. 30, 2016 (Kazakh time). To source
NASA astronaut Kate Rubins is pictured inside of the Soyuz MS-01 spacecraft while conducting routine spacesuit checks. The Expedition 49 trio of Rubins, JAXA astronaut Takuya Onishi and cosmonaut Anatoly Ivanishin are scheduled to undock their Soyuz on Saturday, Oct. 29, and land at 11:59 p.m. EDT. To source
NASA’s Kepler and Swift missions have found rapidly rotating stars producing more than 100 times our own sun’s peak X-ray emission. Spinning so fast they resemble pumpkins, the stars likely formed by mergers of sun-like stars. original
This photograph shows the first pass of Echo 1, America’s first communications satellite, over the Goldstone Tracking Station managed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in Pasadena, California, in the early morning of Aug. 12, 1960. The movement of the antenna, star trails, and Echo 1 (the long streak in the middle) are visible in this […]
The Operational Land Imager (OLI) on Landsat 8 captured this image of the Potomac River and canal on September 27, 2016. The image shows the stretch between Hancock and Cumberland, Maryland—about 97 kilometers (60 miles) if you were to hike or bike along the towpath between these two towns. West Virginia is south of the […]
Orbital ATK’s Cygnus cargo craft (left) is seen from the Cupola module windows aboard the International Space Station on Oct. 23, 2016. The main robotic work station for controlling the Canadarm2 robotic arm is located inside the Cupola and was used to capture Cygnus upon its arrival. To source
An engineer guides the upper dome of a Boeing CST-100 Starliner as it is connected to the lower dome to complete the first hull of the Starliner’s Structural Test Article. The Starliner is one of two spacecraft in development in partnership with NASA’s Commercial Crew Program that will enable astronauts to fly to the International […]
Heartbeat stars got their name because if you were to map out their brightness over time, the result looks like an electrocardiogram, a graph of the electrical activity of the heart. original
Via a NASA-led citizen science project, eight people with no formal training in astrophysics helped discover what could be a fruitful new place to search for planets outside our solar system – a large disk of gas and dust encircling a star known as a circumstellar disk. To source
Huge waves are sculpted in this two-lobed nebula called the Red Spider Nebula, located some 3,000 light-years away in the constellation of Sagittarius. To source
Media are invited to join NASA Administrator Charles Bolden Wednesday, Nov. 2, for an update about what’s in store for NASA’s next great observatory, the James Webb Space Telescope, and a rare glimpse of the telescope’s mirrors. To source
This image of the sunlit part of Jupiter and its swirling atmosphere was created by a citizen scientist (Alex Mai) using data from Juno’s JunoCam instrument. JunoCam’s raw images are available at www.missionjuno.swri.edu/junocam for the public to peruse and process into image products. To source