Month: May 2017

The towering primary mirror of NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope stands inside a cleanroom at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, where it will undergo its last cryogenic test before it is launched into space in 2018. In preparation for testing, the “wings” of the mirror (which consist of the three segments on each side) were spread open. via NASA http://ift.tt/2qNH25o

The projection of Saturn's shadow on the rings grows shorter as Saturn’s season advances toward northern summer. via NASA http://ift.tt/2r8XD3z

Nearly 50 student teams from middle and high schools, colleges and universities in 22 states demonstrated advanced rocketry and engineering skills in NASA's 2017 Student Launch challenge. Teams spent eight months building and testing rockets designed to fly to an altitude of one mile, deploy an automated parachute system, and safely land for reuse. via NASA http://ift.tt/2pGdcek

Expedition 51 Flight Engineer Jack Fischer of NASA is seen inside the International Space Station in his spacesuit during a fit check, in preparation for a spacewalk on Friday, May 12, 2017. This will be the 200th spacewalk at the station for assembly and maintenance, the ninth spacewalk for NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson and the first for Fischer. via NASA http://ift.tt/2qwu8ZK

This composite image of the Crab Nebula, a supernova remnant, was assembled by combining data from five telescopes spanning nearly the entire breadth of the electromagnetic spectrum: the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array, the Spitzer Space Telescope, the Hubble Space Telescope, the XMM-Newton Observatory, and the Chandra X-ray Observatory. via NASA http://ift.tt/2q3p0uT

The shadow of NASA's P-3 aircraft is seen over an iceberg on a May 8, 2017 flight supporting NASA's Operation IceBridge mission. IceBridge began its final week of Arctic Spring 2017 surveys with a glacier-packed mission in Greenland, called Southeast Glaciers 01. via NASA http://ift.tt/2pgWHtL

Saturn's hexagonal polar jet stream is the shining feature of almost every view of the north polar region of Saturn. via NASA http://ift.tt/2prpfwB

This 360-degree mosaic from the Mast Camera (Mastcam) on NASA's Curiosity Mars rover looks out over a portion of the Bagnold Dunes, which stretch for several miles. via NASA http://ift.tt/2p4yfvJ

This illustration shows a hypothetical planet covered in water around the binary star system of Kepler-35A and B. With two suns in its sky, Luke Skywalker's home planet Tatooine in "Star Wars" looks like a parched, sandy desert world. In real life, we know that two-star systems can indeed support planets. via NASA http://ift.tt/2p9yXmD

In the north, Enceladus' surface appears to be about as old as any in the solar system. The south, however, is an entirely different story. via NASA http://ift.tt/2p5HPcO

Machining for NASA's Orion spacecraft, scheduled to fly on the second integrated flight with agency's Space Launch System rocket, is well underway at Ingersoll Machine Tools in Rockford, Illinois. The new deep space spacecraft will take humans farther into the solar system than we have ever traveled before. via NASA http://ift.tt/2qANEQE

Areas near the equator are frequently cloudy, obscuring the view of Earth’s surface from space. April 7, 2017, was no different. On that day, the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite captured this natural-color image of clouds over the Gilbert Islands. via NASA http://ift.tt/2oYkeLf