The Milky Way appears beyond Earth's horizon in this celestial photograph captured on Jan. 29, 2025, by NASA astronaut Don Pettit using a camera with low light and long duration settings pointed out a window on the SpaceX Dragon crew spacecraft. The International Space Station was orbiting 265 miles above the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Chile just before sunrise...
NASA’s X-59 lights up the night sky with its unique Mach diamonds, also known as shock diamonds, during maximum afterburner testing at Lockheed Martin Skunk Works in Palmdale, California. The test demonstrates the engine’s ability to generate the thrust required for supersonic flight, advancing NASA’s Quesst mission...
Tall plumes of white vapor rise from the rocky Venusian surface in this April 19, 1977, artist’s concept...
This NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope reveals clouds of gas and dust near the Tarantula Nebula, located in the Large Magellanic Cloud about 160,000 light-years away...
Engineers with NASA’s Exploration Ground Systems complete stacking operations on the twin SLS (Space Launch System) solid rocket boosters for Artemis II by integrating the nose cones atop the forward assemblies inside the Vehicle Assembly Building’s High Bay 3 at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Wednesday, Feb. 19, 2025. The twin solid boosters will help support the remaining rocket components and the Orion spacecraft during final assembly of the Artemis II Moon rocket and provide more than 75 percent of the total SLS thrust during liftoff from NASA Kennedy’s Launch Pad 39B...
This updated version of "the Pale Blue Dot," made for the photo's 30th anniversary in 2020, uses modern image-processing software and techniques to revisit the well-known Voyager view while attempting to respect the original data and intent of those who planned the images...
This composite image contains the deepest X-ray image ever made of the spectacular star forming region called 30 Doradus. By combining X-ray data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory (blue and green) with optical data from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope (yellow) and radio data from the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (orange), this stellar arrangement comes alive...
One of three small lunar rovers that are part of a NASA technology demonstration called CADRE (Cooperative Autonomous Distributed Robotic Exploration) is prepared for shipping in a clean room at the agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California on Jan. 29, 2025...
NASA's Curiosity Mars rover captured this feather-shaped iridescent cloud just after sunset on Jan. 27, 2023, the 3,724th Martian day, or sol, of the mission. Studying the colors in iridescent clouds tells scientists something about particle size within the clouds and how they grow over time. These clouds were captured as part of a follow-on imaging campaign to study noctilucent, or "night-shining" clouds, which started in 2021. This scene made up of 28 individual images captured by the rover's Mast Camera, or Mastcam...
The brilliant exhaust from the solid rocket boosters (center) and blue mach diamonds from the main engine nozzles mark the launch of Space Shuttle Endeavour from Launch Pad 39A on Feb. 11, 2000...
This view from space shuttle Columbia shows Mount Everest, which reaches 29,028 feet in elevation (8,848 meters), along with many glaciers. Mount Everest is to the left of the V-shaped valley...
The full moon rises over the Superdome and the city of New Orleans, Louisiana on Monday evening, January 13, 2025. The Wolf Moon, also known as the Ice or Cold Moon, was full at 5:27 p.m. EST. New Orleans is home to NASA’s Michoud Assembly Facility where several pieces of hardware for the SLS (Space Launch System) are being built...