保护地球，探索宇宙，发现文明
Spring doesn’t just hapen on Earth. Spring also happens on some of our neighboring planets in the solar system. Of the countless equinoxes Saturn has seen since the birth of the solar system, this one, captured here in a mosaic of light and dark, is the first witnessed up close by an emissary from Earth … none other than our faithful robotic explorer, ...
On March 18, 1978, space shuttle Enterprise arrived at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center for mated vertical ground vibration testing, which marked the first time the entire shuttle compliment – orbiter, external tank, and solid rocket boosters – were mated vertically. Here, Enterprise is offloaded at Redstone Arsenal Airfield before being moved to Marshall...
An illustration of NASA’s Ingenuity Helicopter flying on Mars. Ingenuity, a technology demonstration experiment, will be the first aircraft to attempt powered, controlled flight on another planet. Ingenuity arrived at Mars on Feb. 18, 2021, attached to the belly of NASA’s Mars 2020 Perseverance rover. Ingenuity is expected to attempt its first flight t...
Sometime in the far distant future, about 4 billion years from now, our Milky Way galaxy will collide with the neighboring Andromeda galaxy, as illustrated in this artist’s rendition. The universe is expanding and accelerating, and collisions between galaxies in close proximity to each other still happen because they are bound by the gravity of the dar...
In this image from Jan. 18, 2019, Teddy Tzanetos, MiMi Aung and Bob Balaram of NASA’s Mars Helicopter project observe a flight test of a model of the Mars Helicopter in the Space Simulator, a 25-foot-wide (7.62 meter-wide) vacuum chamber at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). Aung is currently the Mars Helicopter Project manager. Aung, who has worked at JPL...
NASA uses pi every day! Pi is instrumental in developing the size of parachutes to land on the Red Planet. In fact, pi helps engineers determine how big the parachute needs to be in order to generate the drag needed to slow down craft landing on Mars. It also helps researchers map and explore Earth and planets in our own and other solar systems. In this June...
During the March 5, 2021, spacewalk, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) astronaut Soichi Noguchi spent nearly 7 hours working on the farthest set of existing solar arrays on the International Space Station’s left (port) side, known as P6, to install a modification kit on solar array 4B and reconfigure the modification kit on 2B, completing tasks that ...
This image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope features an impressive portrait of M1-63, an example of a bipolar planetary nebula located in the constellation of Scutum (the Shield). A nebula like this one is formed when the star at its center sheds huge quantities of material from its outer layers, leaving behind a spectacular cloud of gas and dust. It...
Stacking is complete for the twin Space Launch System (SLS) solid rocket boosters for NASA’s Artemis I mission. Over several weeks, workers used one of five massive cranes to place 10 booster segments and nose assemblies on the mobile launcher inside the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Engineers with Exploration Gro...
March 8 of each year is celebrated around the globe as International Women’s Day. At NASA, women – be they scientists, pilots, astronauts or subject matter experts – help the agency fulfill its mission. Joan Higginbotham is one of those women. She was selected as an astronaut candidate in 1996. She began her career at NASA in 1987 as an electrical engi...