The space shuttle Endeavour, mission STS-88, launched Dec. 6, 1998, from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center carrying the U.S.-built Unity connecting module and two pressurized mating adapters. Unity was the first piece of the International Space Station provided by the United... Continue Reading →
On January 1 New Horizons encountered the Kuiper Belt object nicknamed Ultima Thule. Some 6.5 billion kilometers from the Sun, Ultima Thule is the most distant world ever explored by a spacecraft from Earth. This historic image, the highest resolution image released so far, was... Continue Reading →
The Great Nebula in Orion is an intriguing place. Visible to the unaided eye, it appears as a small fuzzy patch in the constellation of Orion. But this image, an illusory-color four-panel mosaic taken in different bands of infrared light with the Earth orbiting WISE observatory,... Continue Reading →
Remember Rosetta? That comet-chasing European Space Agency (ESA) probe that deployed (and accidentally bounced) its lander Philae on the surface of Comet 67P? This GIF is made up of images Rosetta beamed back to Earth, which have been freely available... Continue Reading →
It is the largest and most sophisticated object ever built off the Earth. It has taken numerous spaceflights and over a decade to construct. The International Space Station (ISS) is currently the premiere habitat for humans in Earth orbit, and an amalgamation of sophisticated orbiting... Continue Reading →
Double, double toil and trouble; Fire burn, and cauldron bubble .... maybe Macbeth should have consulted the Witch Head Nebula. A frighteningly shaped reflection nebula, this cosmic crone is about 800 light-years away though. Its malevolent visage seems to glare toward nearby... Continue Reading →
The Mars Express orbiter has taken some stunning photos of Korolev Crater, an ice-filled crater near the Martian north pole. It looks from a distance like a snowy winter landscape on Earth. Mars is famous for its polar ice caps... Continue Reading →
When we celebrate the start of 2019, on January 1 the New Horizons spacecraft will flyby Ultima Thule. A world of the Kuiper belt 6.5 billion kilometers from the Sun, the nickname Ultima Thule (catalog designation 2014 MU69) fittingly means "beyond the known world". Following its 2015 flyby... Continue Reading →
Researchers at the Universities of Zurich and Cambridge have discovered a new, exotic class of planets outside our solar system. These super-Earths were formed at high temperatures close to their host star and contain high quantities of calcium, aluminum and... Continue Reading →
Scents of Science 