Space Universe🌌

And now for something completely different... During its 26th flight, the Ingenuity #MarsHelicopter—the first powered aircraft to fly on another world—spotted gear used by the Perseverance rover to survive its descent to the Martian surface. We've seen similar sights like this from orbit thanks to the HiRise camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, but this is the first time we've been able to survey the scene up close, and it can teach us a lot about the forces of landing on Mars. In surveying both the parachute that helped Perseverance land on Mars and the cone-shaped backshell that protected the rover in deep space and during its fiery descent toward the surface of the planet, Ingenuity may provide valuable information that could benefit future landings on Mars.

The fantastic Crew 4 sets on their journey to the space station! At 3:52 a.m. ET (7:52 UTC), four astronauts aboard the SpaceX Crew Dragon Freedom launched from NASA Kennedy atop a Falcon 9 rocket on their way to the ISS. Astronauts Astro Kjell, Astro Farmer Bob, Astro Watkins, and European Space Agency’s Samantha Cristoforetti will spend six months aboard the orbiting lab. They will conduct scientific research in areas such as medical technology, human health, and materials to benefit life on Earth—while enabling us to prepare for human exploration to the Moon and Mars. Four Fun Facts: Crew-4 is our fourth rotational mission with SpaceX, launching four crew members, in the fourth month of the year, on a fourth-flight booster – a first for Commercial Crew and a huge accomplishment for the team and industry. Credit: NASA/Aubrey Gemignani

That golden hour glow 🌞 The Earth basks in the Sun’s light as it glints off the Atlantic Ocean in this image captured from the International Space Station (@ISS) as it orbits 262 miles above. While the football field-sized space station is a great place to gaze lovingly back to Earth, it also hosts a plethora of science and technology experiments that are continuously being conducted by crew members. Want to gaze right back? You can watch the International Space Station pass overhead from several thousand worldwide locations. It is the third brightest object in the sky and easy to spot if you know when to look up. Visible to the naked eye, it looks like a fast-moving plane only much higher and traveling thousands of miles an hour faster! Check out spotthestation.nasa.gov to find out when it will pass over your location.

This visualization simulates the appearance of a black hole as seen on its edge, where inbound matter has collected into a thin, hot structure called an accretion disk. The black hole’s extreme gravity alters the paths of light coming from different parts of the disk, making rings of matter visible above and below. At the center lies the black hole's shadow, an area roughly twice the size of the event horizon — its point of no return. This visualization was first published in September 2019, about six months after scientists with the Event Horizon Telescope released the first actual image of a black hole and its shadow.

MayThe 4th, swipe through a special tour of the solar system to witness real worlds that share a striking resemblance to fictional ones found in a galaxy far, far away. Hoth—home to the iconic windswept tundra disturbed by Imperial AT-AT walkers in “The Empire Strikes Back,” Hoth is much like Pluto. The dwarf planet on the far end of our solar system can reach temperatures as low as -375° F (-240° C) cold enough to worry even a tauntaun. In fact, Pluto's surface is dominated by mountains, valleys, plains, and craters of frozen water and gases like methane. Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute/Alex Parker Mustafar—the volcanic world first seen in “Revenge of the Sith” shares a resemblance to Venus, the second planet from the Sun. The planet's thick atmosphere hides a surface covered with lava flows, quake faults, and impact craters. One lava-filled basin is larger than the continental U.S., and one volcano is taller than Mt.

6,000 candles in the wind. 💨 Spring in the Northern Hemisphere means many things: flowers are in bloom, days are getting longer, and animals head north for the summer. In the skies above the Labrador Sea, spring brings “cloud streets” or parallel bands of cumulus clouds. The “cloud streets” pattern results from strong, cold winds blowing over the relatively warmer sea, pushing warm air toward the frigid air. This air movement causes a temperature inversion warm (air on top of cold air), which acts as a cap and causes the air to roll over and form parallel cylinders of rotating air. Clouds form on the upper side of these cylinders (the rising air). Along the downward side (descending air), skies are clear. This image was captured by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer on our Aqua satellite. Aqua’s primary mission is to study Earth’s water cycle, including evaporation from oceans, sea ice, land ice, water vapor in the atmosphere, and cloud formation.

Our astronauts are home! 👩‍🚀 At 12:43 a.m. EDT (04:43 UTC) on May 6, SpaceX's Dragon Endurance spacecraft splashed down off the coast of Florida, wrapping up Crew3 mission's 177 days in orbit. Our four Crew-3 astronauts—Kayla Barron, Raja Chari, Tom Marshburn, and the European Space Agency's Matthias Maurer—spent their time on the ISS running experiments and testing technologies to make life better on our home planet. They also talked with students, took pictures of the Earth, and shared what it's like to live in space as we work to open spaceflight to humanity. That's not the end of the story, though: our Crew-4 astronauts are already on the station, beginning their own journey on our orbiting laboratory. Keep following us to learn about the latest breakthroughs from across the universe!

Maybe it’s time ⭐️ NASA Hubble captured this image of a starburst spiral galaxy around 80 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Virgo. This galaxy is experiencing intense star formation, likely due to the gravitational forces of neighboring galaxies; astronomers refer to galaxies that form stars rapidly as starburst galaxies. The creation of these stars is causing some peculiar galactic weather – known as a superwind – gigantic movements of gas throughout the galaxy, which is invisible in this picture due to it not being on visible wavelengths imaged by Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3. Two supernovae occurred in this galaxy in the last decade, the first happened in 2014 and the second in 2019, the star that led to the 2019 supernova was 19 times as massive as our Sun. Credit: NASA/ESA

Spitzer walked so Webb could run 👟 The Spitzer Space Telescope, NASA’s infrared Great Observatory, provided high-resolution images of the infrared universe, which paved the way for the James Webb Space Telescope. As Webb continues final instrument calibrations and prepares for the release of the first images in the upcoming weeks, these images from the mirror alignment process give us a preview of Webb’s power. Compare these two images captured of the same view of a portion of the Large Magellanic Cloud, a small irregular galaxy near our own. Webb’s MIRI instrument brings the details we see in the Spitzer image into sharper focus. Webb’s image reveals tendrils of interstellar gas in unprecedented detail. Try this for size: The most important component of a telescope is its primary mirror. The larger the mirror, the more light it can collect, and the smaller, dimmer, and more distant objects it can detect. Webb’s mirror boasts an area almost 45 times greater than Spitzer’s.

With great power, comes great responsibility 🕸 NASA Hubble captured a supernova remnant (SNR) 160,000 light-years from Earth, rupturing the ambient gas clouds around the former star. SNRs play a vital role in our understanding of the universe, as they can both create the building blocks of our universe and change its ecology. Supernovas are the last hurrah of a massive dying star; they occur when the star's fuel runs out. The immense gravitational forces cause the star to collapse so quickly that it explodes. Supernovas are seen as the universe’s factories, creating elements, planets, and even stars. Credit: NASA/ESA/HEIC and The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)

As time GOES by. 🛰 A little more than 22,000 miles (34,000 kilometers) above Earth, the newest NOAA Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES) has released its first photos. Locked in a geostationary orbit, GOES-18 covers the same section of Earth – over the western contiguous United States, Alaska, Hawaii, Mexico, Central America, and parts of South America and the Pacific Ocean. The GOES satellites are the most advanced weather-monitoring satellites in the Western Hemisphere; they provide high-resolution imagery, atmospheric measurements, and lightning maps of our home planet, all in real-time, and monitor space weather with enhanced solar imaging and an upgraded magnetometer - which measures magnetic field variations. GOES-18 will help meteorologists and scientists monitor storms, wildfires, hurricanes, and climate change. ⁣ Credit: NOAA/NASA