Space Universe🌌

Who’s ready for the NASA Webb Space Telescope? 🙋‍♀️ Like with Hubble, Webb's launch will usher in a new era of astronomy. Webb will see beyond Hubble’s infrared vision to expand our perspective to the far reaches of the universe. Working with Webb, Hubble’s visible and ultraviolet vision will complement Webb’s infrared views. This powerful duo will provide us with staggering cosmic vistas, the likes of which we have only imagined.

🏠 How's that for curb appeal? On their way back to Earth last month, our Crew-2 astronauts made a loop around the ISS in their SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft, taking a number of pictures which we've now assembled into this new photo album of our orbiting laboratory. Long-time spacewatchers may be excited to see the new ISS Roll-Out Solar Array on the right side of these photos, a flexible solar panel that could provide a compact source of energy for future space missions. We've been making our home on the International Space Station for more than 20 years, working with countries around the world to study how to live in space while making life better back on Earth.

Outroll, outexplore, outlast!⁣ ⁣ Surviving more than 3,300 Martian days (or sols) since its landing, NASA's Curiosity rover has been trekking across Gale Crater since 2011 on its quest for signs of long-ago life on the Red Planet.⁣ ⁣ In the meanwhile, it's snapped some great pictures, too! This 360-degree selfie is a combination of 81 individual photos taken using the Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI) at the end of Curiosity's robotic arm. This selfie was taken near Greenheugh Pediment, which Curiosity previously climbed in 2020; Curiosity is headed towards Maria Gordon Notch, the U-shaped opening behind the rover to the left.⁣

Baby, it’s icy outside. 🧊 This icefield of the southern Andes mountains was captured by an astronaut aboard the International Space Station. The mountain peaks here reach high enough and temperatures remain cold enough year-round that permanent ice persists amid a warming world. It was significantly larger about 18,000 years ago, during the coldest phase of the last Ice Age, covering almost the entire view in this image—an enormous area considering that the present icefield is more than 100 kilometers (60 miles) long. Glacial ice moves slowly downhill under its own weight. As it flows, it cuts valleys into the underlying rocks. There have been several ice ages in the past, and scientists now know that the lakes at the top of this image and the network of valleys (fjords) at the bottom were gouged out by the erosion of moving glacial ice when the icefields were much larger. In a recently published survey of glaciers, scientists showed that the Patagonian icefields follow the global trend of ice melt

We've touched the Sun! For the first time in history, a spacecraft has entered the solar corona—the point in the Sun's atmosphere where its magnetism and gravity are strong enough to stop solar material from escaping. Our Parker Solar Probe, launched in 2018, first swooped through the Sun's corona for a short period earlier this year. Just as landing on the Moon allowed scientists to understand how it was formed, touching the very stuff the Sun is made of will help scientists uncover critical information about our closest star and its influence on the solar system. For example, Parker Solar Probe's journey through the corona is already helping astrophysicists understand the origins of unusual zig-zags found in the solar wind that flows past Earth and planets beyond. Parker has already made ten fly-bys of the Sun and will continue to swirl ever-closer as it collects data over the next four years. The image seen here was taken by our Solar Dynamics Observatory in March 2012, as a giant eruption of solar mate

Servicing Mission 3A launched in 1999 to “wake up” Hubble after the telescope switched into safe mode following the failures of four of its six gyroscopes. Music credit: “Achieving the Impossible” by Joel Goodman [ASCAP] and Vicente Julio Ortiz Gimeno [SGAE] via Medley Lane Music [ASCAP] and Universal Production Music

Look, Ma, four cavities! A pair of supermassive black holes could be behind a set of cosmic cavities, or bubbles, recently spotted by our orbiting NASA chandraxray observatory. The four bubbles were detected 3.9 billion light-years from Earth in a galaxy cluster, a collection of hot gas, dark matter and thousands of galaxies that is among the largest structures in the universe held together by gravity. Many galaxy clusters have a pair of cavities, caused by a single black hole spewing out twin streams of matter from the cluster's center, but this is the first known instance of a galaxy cluster with four massive bubbles instead of two. Astronomers hypothesize that a single black hole which quickly flipped on its side could also be behind this galactic oddity. These images show the galaxy cluster RBS 797 as seen in X-rays by Chandra, visualized here in blue and white, alongside a photo of the cluster as seen in visible light by NASA hubble.

Hubble: Your friendly neighborhood space telescope! From right here in our solar system to deep space, Hubble’s observations have lent a “helping hand” to several other missions – including preparatory work for the NASA Webb Space Telescope, which is expected to launch on December 24! Read more at the link in our bio.

Get my good side. If you’re a galaxy, that tends to be all sides. Take this edge-on view captured by NAS AHubble for example. This spiral galaxy’s tightly wound spiral arms steal the show, revealing bands of stars and dark clouds of dust. It’s located 230 million light-years away in the constellation Aquila and lies close to the plane of the Milky Way. So close that foreground stars from our own galaxy have crept into the image – the two prominent stars in front of this galaxy are interlopers from within the Milky Way. The spikes surrounding these stars are imaging artifacts, called diffraction spikes. They are the result of starlight interacting with the structure that supports Hubble’s secondary mirror.

See you space cowboy... The 6 hour and 32-minute spacewalk was the fifth spacewalk for Marshburn and the first for Barron, and was the thirteenth spacewalk of the year.

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