In New York City on Tuesday, Feb. 16, 2021, the Empire State Building is illuminated in red to celebrate this Thursday’s scheduled landing on Mars of NASA’s Perseverance rover. A key objective for Perseverance’s mission on Mars is astrobiology, including the search for signs of ancient m […]
If we find life on the Red Planet, we’ll have astrobiologists like Dr. Kennda Lynch to thank. Lynch is an astrobiologist and geomicrobiologist studying life in extreme environments on Earth as models for characterizing habitable environments and searching for biosignatures on other planetary b
A physician, flight surgeon, and NASA astronaut, Bernard Harris became the first African American to perform a spacewalk in February 1995, during space shuttle Discovery’s STS-63 mission. This was a mission of firsts. It was also the first time a shuttle rendezvoused with the Russian Mir space
There are more than 100,000 proteins in the human body. Every structure is different, and each one of them holds important information related to our health. Each protein has a unique and complicated structure that is closely related to its function. Therefore, revealing a protein’s structure leads
This stunning image captures a small region on the edge of the inky Coalsack Nebula, or Caldwell 99. Caldwell 99 is a dark nebula — a dense cloud of interstellar dust that completely blocks out visible wavelengths of light from objects behind it. The object at the center of the image is a (much smal
This view of a sunrise breaking through the Earth’s horizon was taken on Feb 3, 2021, as the International Space Station orbited 271 miles above the Pacific Ocean off the coast of southern Chile in South America. The space station, humanity’s only orbital laboratory, orbits the Earth abo
In this image from 2018, NASA astronaut Jeanette Epps trains in a U.S. spacesuit at the Johnson Space Center. Epps is assigned to NASA’s Boeing Starliner-1 mission, the first operational crewed flight of Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner spacecraft on a mission to the International Space Station. She will
The tip of the “wing” of the Small Magellanic Cloud galaxy is dazzling in this 2013 view from NASA’s Great Observatories. The Small Magellanic Cloud, or SMC, is a small galaxy about 200,000 light-years way that orbits our own Milky Way spiral galaxy. The colors represent wavelength
Apollo 14 arrived in lunar orbit on Feb. 4, 1971, to prepare for the landing in and exploration of the Fra Mauro highlands. Apollo 14 launched carrying astronauts Commander Alan Shepard, lunar module pilot Edgar Mitchell, and command module pilot Stuart Roosa. Engineers had modified the spacecraft t
This picture of the waning gibbous Moon was taken on Jan 29, 2021, the day after its full Moon phase as the International Space Station orbited 264 miles above China near the Mongolian border. Humanity’s only orbital laboratory, the space station, orbits the Earth about 90 minutes or about 16
