There’s this seemingly cool supernova before it exploded, and then the remnants of one located 9,000 light-years away, captured by NASA’s Chandra X-ray observatory telescope. All the colors you see are the three bands of X-ray light detected by Chandra, with low energy X-rays in red, medium in green, and the highest in blue.
While turning Martian soil into cement may take a few more years of research, NASA engineers are already developing a Simplified High Impact Energy Landing Device (SHIELD) to crash land on Mars. Why? They found the easiest way to get to the Martian surface is to crash and instead of a spacecraft’s high-speed descent, SHIELD would use an accordion-like, collapsible base that acts like the crumple zone of a car to absorb the energy.
NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover has finally arrived at the salty mineral region of Mount Sharp left over from 1+ billion year-old streams and ponds as the water dried up. These minerals should provide fascinating clues as to how the Red Planet’s climate changed from being more Earth-like to the barren landscape it is today.
Aside from this cosmic tarantula, NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope captured a colorful cosmic knot from the early universe. More specifically, a cluster of gigantic galaxies in the process of formation around an extremely red quasar.
NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope images the Pillars of Creation like you’ve never seen before. What you see are new stars being forming within dense clouds of gas and dust, while the rock formation-like pillars are actually made up of cool interstellar material that appears to be semi-transparent in near-infrared light.
NASA’s Near-Earth Object Wide Field Infrared Survey Explorer (NEOWISE) space telescope recently completed its one trip halfway around the Sun, taking images in all directions and compiling them into an amazing 12 year time-lapse of the sky. This formed a map showing the location and brightness of hundreds of millions of objects utilizing 18 all-sky maps produced by the spacecraft.
Scientists have turned plastic into diamonds using X-rays, and NASA’s Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer (IXPE) helped uncover the secrets of exploded star Cassiopeia A. This was the first object that object IXPE observed after it began collecting data because its shock waves are some of the fastest in the Milky Way.
It’s not everyday that you see Earth from space, much less at night with dazzling blue blobs. An International Space Station (ISS) astronaut captured this image while orbiting over Southeast Asia, overlooking the Vietnamese coast and Thailand. We see the circular shape of Hainan Island, which sits about 20 kilometers (12 miles) from mainland China.
Now that you’ve experienced a grand tour of the outer solar system, check out the latest Hubble Space Telescope image of a mesmerizing multiwavelength stellar nursery view. What you’re seeing are two Herbig–Haro objects – HH 1 and HH 2 – located in the constellation Orion around 1250 light-years from Earth.
NASA recently conducted an important vacuum gun test at their Remote Hypervelocity Test Laboratory within the White Sands Test Facility in Las Cruces, New Mexico for space rock collision research. The data gathered will be used to design shields that will eventually protect future spacecraft as well as astronauts from micrometeorites and space debris.