This is the SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule, sitting on its cargo-carrying “trunk”. The dragon will (God willing) carry two astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS) this Wednesday.
On October 28th, 2014, the Orbital ATK Antares rocket exploded on takeoff, destroying the vehicle and the supplies that were being sent to the astronauts on-board the International Space Station. The explosion was captured by a large number of photographers and videographers observing from a distance, but now NASA has published its own up-close photos of the explosion.
Photographer Jack Turkel was born at around the same time as NASA, and grew up with a fantasies of space exploration as the modern space age was swinging into high gear.
When he began his photography career in the mid 1970s, Turkel decided to combine his two loves by creating a unique, space-themed darkroom.
Here's an amazing "selfie" photograph that's literally out of this world. It was captured a couple of days ago by the Rosetta mission, which is studying a comet over 250 million miles away from Earth on behalf of the European Space Agency (ESA).
Check out this photograph NASA captured recently during the launch of its LADEE spacecraft. Notice anything unusual? If you're thinking that the strange dark spot seen in the middle of the smoke plume looks familiar, you're right -- that's a frog.
If you had the task of choosing some photos that represented Earth and mankind to extraterrestrial life forms, which photos would you select? NASA had to do this back in 1977 when it launched the Voyager space probes, which are now the farthest human-made objects from Earth. A committee led by Carl Sagan eventually settled on 116 images:
[...] a collection of 116 pictures (one of which is for calibration) detailing but not limited to human life on earth and the planet itself. Many pictures are annotated with one or many indications of scales of time, size or mass. Some images also contain indications of chemical composition. All measures used on the pictures are first defined in the first few images using physical references.
Among the photos chosen was Ansel Adam's famous Snake River and Grand Tetons photograph.