This image shows sample site Nightingale Crater, OSIRIS-REx’s primary sample collection site on asteroid Bennu. The image is overlaid with a graphic of the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft to illustrate the scale of the site. In August, the robotic spacecraft will make NASA’s first-ever attempt to descend to t […]
Equipped with visionary science instruments, the Mars Perseverance rover underwent an “eye” exam after several cameras were installed. The rover contains an armada of imaging capabilities, from wide-angle landscape cameras to narrow-angle high-resolution zoom lens cameras. This image, ta
Apollo 13 launched on April 11, 1970, on a journey to become the third crew to land on the Moon. The crew never made it. The mission became known as “a successful failure” that saw the safe return of its crew in spite of a catastrophic explosion. This artist’s concept—by Teledyne Ryan Aeronaut
The Soyuz MS-16 lifts off from Site 31 at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on Thursday, April 9, 2020, sending Expedition 63 crewmembers Chris Cassidy of NASA and Anatoly Ivanishin and Ivan Vagner of Roscosmos into orbit for a six-hour flight to the International Space Station and the start of
The X-59 Quiet SuperSonic Technology, or QueSST, wing assembly is lifted by a crane and moved to another area of the manufacturing floor in preparation for wing skin installation. The aircraft is under construction at Lockheed Martin in Palmdale, California, and will fly for the first time in 2021.
Aboard the International Space Station, NASA astronaut Jessica Meir conducts cardiac research inside the Life Sciences Glovebox, a biology research facility located in Japan’s Kibo laboratory module. The Engineered Heart Tissues investigation explores cardiac function in weightlessness, which
Human eyes can see only a small portion of the range of radiation given off by the objects around us. We call this wide array of radiation the electromagnetic spectrum, and the part we can see visible light. In this Hubble Space Telescope image, researchers revisited one of Hubble’s most iconi
This remarkable spiral galaxy, known as NGC 4651, may look serene and peaceful as it swirls in the vast, silent emptiness of space, but don’t be fooled — it keeps a violent secret. It is believed that this galaxy consumed another smaller galaxy to become the large and beautiful spiral that we observ
This 2010 image from the Herschel Space Observatory shows dust clouds associated with the Rosette Nebula, a stellar nursery about 5,000 light-years from Earth in the Monoceros, or Unicorn, constellation. Herschel collected the infrared light given out by dust. The bright smudges are dusty cocoons co
Appearing as strings of orange dots, the brightest sets of dots belong to asteroids Klotho and Lina. Both orbit out in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, while smaller, more distant asteroids can also be seen passing through the image. These asteroids were imaged by NEOWISE, the astero
