保护地球，探索宇宙，发现文明
A paddlewheeler makes its way up the Mississippi River as the Moon rises over New Orleans on Sunday evening, Aug. 22, 2021. The August Sturgeon Moon, which was also a rare Blue Moon, was full at 7:02 a.m. local time Sunday but the nearly full Moon still put on a show when it rose over New Orleans later that evening. New Orleans is home to the NASA Michoud As...
Launched in 1977, the twin Voyager probes are NASA’s longest-operating mission and the only spacecraft ever to explore interstellar space. 45 years on, Voyager 1 and 2 continue to provide us with observations of the farthest reaches of space. Our Voyager 1 spacecraft zoomed toward Jupiter in January and February 1979, capturing hundreds of images of Jupiter ...
NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) rocket with the Orion spacecraft aboard is seen atop the mobile launcher as it is rolled up the ramp at Launch Pad 39B, Wednesday, Aug. 17, 2022, at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. NASA’s Artemis I mission is the first integrated test of the agency’s deep space exploration systems: the Orion spacecraft, SLS rocket, an...
The Perseid meteors are an annual event many skywatchers look forward to, as they often produce lots of shooting stars to enjoy. The Perseids are debris remnants of Comet Swift-Tuttle, which takes 133 years to orbit the Sun once. The meteors often leave long “wakes” of light and color behind them as they streak through Earth’s atmosphere. They’re also ...
A team of roboticists from NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston have applied their expertise in making robots for deep space to designing a fully electric shape-changing submersible robot that will cut costs for maritime industries. Aquanaut, seen here during testing in the giant pool at Johnson’s Neutral Buoyancy Lab, opens its shell and turns its arms, c...
This celestial cloudscape from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope captures the colorful region in the Orion Nebula surrounding the Herbig-Haro object HH 505. Herbig-Haro objects are luminous regions surrounding newborn stars that form when stellar winds or jets of gas spew from these infant stars creating shockwaves that collide with nearby gas and dust at ...
In this picture from 2016, our Super Guppy, a specialized aircraft with a unique hinged nose, lands at Moffett Field at NASA Ames. Boasting an immense cargo area that is 25 feet in diameter and 111 feet long, the Super Guppy can carry items that are virtually impossible to fit inside other cargo aircraft. In early August 2022, it arrived at Marshall with a s...
This Moon-mosaic is comprised of 1,231 images taken by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter’s (LRO) Narrow-Angle Camera (NAC) in the summer of 2018. The LRO team chose each tile from over 10,000 of the highest quality LROC NAC frames by searching for the best match of brightness and gradient (the direction and size of the brightness change across the frame...
Today marks 10 years since the Curiosity rover landed on Mars. Since August 2012, Curiosity has been exploring 3-mile-high Mt. Sharp in Gale Crater. The rover has climbed more than 2,000 feet (612 meters), reaching progressively younger rocks that serve as a record on how Mars has evolved from a wet, habitable planet to a cold desert environment. The photoge...
Like distant galaxies amid clouds of interstellar dust, chunks of sea ice drift through graceful swirls of grease ice in the frigid waters of Foxe Basin near Baffin Island in the Canadian Arctic. Sea ice often begins as grease ice, a soupy slick of tiny ice crystals on the ocean’s surface. As the temperature drops, grease ice thickens and coalesces int...