u/Busy_Yesterday9455

Credit: Astronaut Anil Menon

Credit: Astronaut Anil Menon

On April 29, 2011, the crew of the space shuttle Endeavour filmed the spacecraft's external tank after its separation. It continued its trajectory before disintegrating over the ocean.

Credit: NASA
Edit: Milky Way

On April 29, 2011, the crew of the space shuttle Endeavour filmed the spacecraft's external tank after its separation. It continued its trajectory before disintegrating over the ocean.

Credit: NASA
Edit: Milky Way

Margaret Hamilton standing next to the navigation software that she and her MIT team produced for the Apollo Project.

Margaret Hamilton, who led the software team at MIT's Instrumentation Laboratory, developed the onboard flight computers that guided NASA's Apollo missions, including the safe Apollo 11 landing in 1969. During that historic descent, her team's priority scheduling and error-recovery features silenced overload alarms and kept Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on course.

Credit: Draper Laboratory / Adam Cuerden

Just visible as this green arc on Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula, the Chicxulub asteroid was 6-9 mi/10-15 km wide. It rocked the world.

Credit: NASA/JPL

Link to the science release on NOIRLab website

This image shows Nebula Pa 30, observed with the Gemini North Telescope in Hawai'i. It is likely the remnant of an old supernova explosion: separate historical records by Chinese, Japanese and Arabic astronomers tell of a "guest star" that appeared in the sky for 185 days in the year 1181. It is believed that this bright new point of light came from the supernova that caused the fireworks in Pa 30.

Astronomers don't know exactly what happened in this unusual explosion, classified as a Type Iax supernova, but it is thought to be caused by the merger of two white dwarfs. The mysterious central star in the image is extremely hot and produces a strong wind, possibly forming the radial filaments. Look closely at them: those pearl-like knots stringing the filaments are 4 light-days in diameter. Understanding how a supernova created this amazing nebula continues an 845-year old mystery (and counting).

Credit: International Gemini Observatory/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA. Acknowledgment: PI: T. Cunningham (Center for Astrophysics - Harvard & Smithsonian). Image Processing: J. Miller & M. Rodriguez (International Gemini Observatory/NSF NOIRLab), T.A. Rector (University of Alaska Anchorage/NSF NOIRLab), D. de Martin & M. Zamani (NSF NOIRLab).

Images of Helene taken by the Cassini spacecraft, with resolutions of up to 24 meters per pixel, show a landscape characterized by broad 2–10 km scale depressions with interior slopes no greater than 12°. These basins are likely the decayed remains of old impact craters.

Thin, elongated km-scale raised grooves trace the slopes of many of Helene's basins, likely representing mass flow features and indicating that the moon is undergoing active geologic processes such as mass wasting and erosion. Digital elevation models suggest that the grooves have a positive relief of between 50 and 100 meters. Helene has more than 70 craters, while it shows a bimodal appearance—the heavily cratered trailing hemisphere exhibits a crater density ten times greater than the smooth-looking leading hemisphere.

Credit: NASA / Jet Propulsion Laboratory / Space Science Institute

The Soviet Union put Sputnik, the world's first artificial satellite, into Earth's orbit. Sputnik contained a radio transmitter that sent back the “beep-beep-beep” heard around the world.

Image Credit: NSSDC, NASA

She wrote in her post

>Room with a view. Check out my new digs as I camp out in Dragon until our departure. With Crew-13’s arrival we have a very full house on the International Space Station. Luke is living in my previous crew quarters, and I’ve pitched a tent in Dragon.

Credit: Astronaut Jessica Meir

Link to the science release on NASA website

Jupiter's moon Io, its night side illuminated by reflected sunlight from Jupiter, or "Jupitershine."

Image data: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS
Image processing by Emma Wälimäki © CC BY

Credit: USAF/Brian Shul

Following up on my post yesterday about strong gravitational lensing, today I'd like to share a JWST–Hubble comparison of the same galaxy cluster, MACS J0454.1–0300.

Credit:
JWST: ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA, L. Furtak, S. Fujimoto
Hubble: ESA/Hubble & NASA; Acknowledgement: Nick Rose
Processing: Milky Way

After closely following comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko for 786 days as it rounded the Sun, the Rosetta spacecraft's controlled impact with the comet's surface was confirmed by the loss of signal from the spacecraft on September 30, 2016.

One of the images taken during its final descent, this high-resolution view looks across the comet's stark landscape. The scene spans just over 600 meters (2,000 feet), captured when Rosetta was about 16 kilometers from the comet's surface. Rosetta's descent to the comet brought to an end the operational phase of an inspirational mission of space exploration. Rosetta deployed a lander to the surface of one of the Solar System's most primordial worlds and witnessed first hand how a comet changes when subject to the increasing intensity of the Sun's radiation.

The decision to end the mission on the surface is a result of the comet's orbit now taking it to the dim reaches beyond Jupiter, where there would be a lack of power to operate the spacecraft. Mission operators also faced an approaching period where the Sun would be close to line-of-sight between Earth and Rosetta, making radio communications increasingly difficult.

Credit: ESA , Rosetta , MPS , OSIRIS; UPD/LAM/IAA/SSO/INTA/UPM/DASP/IDA

The small patches of white are cloud tops, soaring above the main, colourful cloud layer.

Image from NASA's Juno spacecraft during its 38th close approach to Jupiter on 29 November 2021, processed by Kevin Gill

Link to the science release on ESA website

A massive galaxy cluster, made of many golden elliptical galaxies with the largest, brightest one in the centre.

Heavily distorted orange galaxies appear all around the cluster, the largest concentrated in a large arc around the cluster's centre; these are images of very distant galaxies, created by gravitational lensing.

A few galaxies are large and bluish-white in colour; bright, nearby stars are the same colour.

Credit: ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA, L. Furtak, S. Fujimoto

Credit: Astronaut Anil Menon

On 26 September 2022, NASA’s DART spacecraft impacted the Dimorphos asteroid at a speed of 6.1 km/s.

Credit:
NASA/Johns Hopkins APL
NASA/ASI/J. Roger
NASA/ASI/N. Méndez/J. Roger
S. D. Raducan (UNIBE)

With a central pressure of 892 mbar (26.34 inHg), it is the second-most intense Pacific hurricane by central pressure ever recorded, behind only Hurricane Patricia.

Credit: NOAA/GOES

Credit:
Left: NASA, ESA, STScI, A. Simon (NASA-GSFC), M. H. Wong (UC Berkeley), J. DePasquale (STScI)
Right: Tom Williams