Flight Engineer Rick Mastracchio captured this view of spacewalkers Oleg Kotov and Sergey Ryazanskiy working outside the International Space Station and posted it to Twitter. Image Credit: NASA
On Dec. 24, 2013, NASA astronaut Mike Hopkins, Expedition 38 Flight Engineer, participates in the second of two spacewalks, spread over a four-day period, which were designed to allow the crew to change out a degraded pump module on the exterior of the Earth-orbiting International Space Station. He was joined on both spacewalks by NASA astronaut Rick Mastracchio, whose image shows up in Hopkins' helmet visor.
The pump module controls the flow of ammonia through cooling loops and radiators outside the space station, and, combined with water-based cooling loops inside the station, removes excess heat into the vacuum of space.
The Double Cluster (NGC 869 and NGC 884) is a stunning pair of open star clusters in the constellation Perseus. These clusters are a “line of sight” pairing, meaning that they only appear double from our perspective. In fact, one cluster is 300 light-years closer than the other, or roughly 70 times the distance of our Sun to the next nearest star. (14.5-inch RC Optical Systems Ritchey-Chrétien telescope, SBIG STL-11000 CCD camera, twelve 90-second exposures through red, green, and blue filters [54 minutes total], stacked)
Located some 25 million light-years away, this new Hubble image shows spiral galaxy ESO 373-8. Together with at least seven of its galactic neighbors, this galaxy is a member of the NGC 2997 group. We see it side-on as a thin, glittering streak across the sky, with all its contents neatly aligned in the same plane.
We see so many galaxies like this — flat, stretched-out pancakes — that our brains barely process their shape. But let us stop and ask: Why are galaxies stretched out and aligned like this?
Try spinning around in your chair with your legs and arms out. Slowly pull your legs and arms inwards, and tuck them in against your body. Notice anything? You should have started spinning faster. This effect is due to conservation of angular momentum, and it’s true for galaxies, too.
This galaxy began life as a humongous ball of slowly rotating gas. Collapsing in upon itself, it spun faster and faster until, like pizza dough spinning and stretching in the air, a disc started to form. Anything that bobbed up and down through this disk was pulled back in line with this motion, creating a streamlined shape.
Angular momentum is always conserved — from a spinning galactic disk 25 million light-years away from us, to any astronomer, or astronomer-wannabe, spinning in an office chair.
Quiet Corona and Upper Transition Region of the Sun
This image, taken on Dec. 31, 2013 by the AIA instrument on NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory at 171 Angstrom, shows the current conditions of the quiet corona and upper transition region of the Sun.
The photographer caught the arc of the Milky Way above the building that houses the 2.4-meter telescope of Yunnan Astronomical Observatory. The constellation Orion the Hunter lies above the dome.
Antares Rocket Rolls Out at NASA's Wallops Flight Facility
An Orbital Sciences Corporation Antares rocket is seen as it is rolled out to Launch Pad-0A at NASA's Wallops Flight Facility, Sunday, Jan. 5, 2014 in advance of a planned Wednesday, Jan. 8th, 1:32 p.m. EST launch, Wallops Island, Va.
The Antares will launch a Cygnus spacecraft on a cargo resupply mission to the International Space Station. The Orbital-1 mission is Orbital Sciences' first contracted cargo delivery flight to the space station for NASA. Among the cargo aboard Cygnus set to launch to the space station are science experiments, crew provisions, spare parts and other hardware.
An Orbital Sciences Corporation Antares rocket is seen on launch Pad-0A at NASA's Wallops Flight Facility, Monday, Jan.6, 2014 in advance of a planned Wednesday, Jan. 8th, 1:32 p.m. EST launch. The Antares will launch a Cygnus spacecraft on a cargo resupply mission to the International Space Station. The Orbital-1 mission is Orbital Sciences' first contracted cargo delivery flight to the space station for NASA. Among the cargo aboard Cygnus set to launch to the space station are science experiments, crew provisions, spare parts and other hardware.
This mosaic image taken on Jan. 4, 2004, by the navigation camera on the Mars Exploration Rover Spirit, shows a 360 degree panoramic view of the rover on the surface of Mars. Spirit operated for more than six years after landing in January 2004 for what was planned as a three-month mission.
Spirit drove 4.8 miles (7.73 kilometers), more than 12 times the goal set for the mission. The drives crossed a plain to reach a distant range of hills that appeared as mere bumps on the horizon from the landing site; climbed slopes up to 30 degrees as Spirit became the first robot to summit a hill on another planet; and covered more than half a mile (nearly a kilometer) after Spirit's right-front wheel became immobile in 2006. The rover returned more than 124,000 images. It ground the surfaces off 15 rock targets and scoured 92 targets with a brush to prepare the targets for inspection with spectrometers and a microscopic imager.
An Orbital Sciences Corporation Antares rocket is seen as it launches from Pad-0A at NASA's Wallops Flight Facility, Thursday, Jan. 9, 2014, Wallops Island, VA. Antares is carrying the Cygnus spacecraft on a cargo resupply mission to the International Space Station. The Orbital-1 mission is Orbital Sciences' first contracted cargo delivery flight to the space station for NASA. Cygnus is carrying science experiments, crew provisions, spare parts and other hardware to the space station.
International Space Station Awaits Orbital-1 Resupply Mission
The sun shines through a truss-based radiator panel and a primary solar array panel on the Earth-orbiting International Space Station (ISS) in this photograph taken by an Expedition 38 crew member on Jan. 2, 2014.
The crew on the ISS is awaiting the first commercial resupply mission to the ISS by Orbital Sciences, Orbital-1. Orbital Sciences will proceed with a 1:07 p.m. EST launch attempt of the Orbital-1 cargo resupply mission to the ISS today, Thursday, Jan. 9.
Meanwhile, as more than 30 heads of space agencies from around the world gather in Washington Jan. 9-10 for an unprecedented summit on the future of space exploration, the Obama Administration has approved an extension of the ISS until at least 2024.
