At 9:32 a.m. EDT on July 16, 1969, the Apollo 11 mission launched via a Saturn V rocket with Commander Neil Armstrong, command module pilot Michael Collins and lunar module pilot Buzz Aldrin from Kennedy Space Center’s Launch Complex Pad 39A. In a little more than eight years after the flights […]
The crew snapped this starry nighttime shot of Rio de Janeiro and surrounding cities on the Brazilian coast, as the International Space Station orbited above São Paolo. Whhile the crew observes Earth from more than 200 miles above the planet, astronaut Bob Behnken and Commander Chris Cassidy also ar
In this image, NASA’s Mars 2020 Perseverance rover waits to be lifted onto its Atlas V launch vehicle at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida on July 7, 2020. The Mars 2020 mission is part of a larger program that includes missions to the Moon as a way to prepare for human explorati
Astronomers using a previously captured Hubble imagery spotted a remarkable image of a young star’s unseen, planet-forming disk casting a huge shadow across a more distant cloud in a star-forming region. The star is called HBC 672, and the shadow feature was nicknamed the “Bat ShadowR
Psyche, the NASA mission to explore a metal-rock asteroid of the same name, recently passed a crucial milestone that brings it closer to its August 2022 launch date. Now the mission is moving from planning and designing to high-gear manufacturing of the spacecraft hardware that will fly to its targe
When space shuttle Atlantis launched in July 2011 on the STS-135 mission carrying the Raffaello multipurpose logistics module and delivering supplies and spare parts to the International Space Station, it was the orbiter’s final flight and the end of an era. Chris Ferguson commanded the missio
Technicians at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida recently finished meticulously applying more than 180 blocks of ablative material to the heat shield for the Orion spacecraft set to carry astronauts around the Moon on Artemis II. The heat shield is one of the most critical elements of Orion and
NASA astronaut Robert Behnken works during the Wednesday, July 1, 2020, six-hour and one-minute spacewalk to swap an aging nickel-hydrogen battery for a new lithium-ion battery on the International Space Station’s Starboard-6 truss structure. NASA astronauts Chris Cassidy and Behnken concluded
Hitching a ride on the Mars Pathfinder mission, the Sojourner rover arrived at the Red Planet on July 4, 1997. The mission was designed to demonstrate a low-cost method for delivering a set of science instruments to Mars, and served as the foundation for the Mars rovers of today. Pathfinder landed t
