The Television InfraRed Observational Satellite (TIROS) 1 was the first weather satellite. Launched into a polar orbit 40 years ago (April 1, 1960) equipped with two TV cameras, TIROS 1 was operational for only 78 days but demonstrated the ...
This false-colour image of the young Trapezium star cluster in the Orion Nebula was made with an infrared camera at wavelengths about twice as long as visible light. The infrared data are part of a sensitive survey of this nearby star forming ...
The last decade saw the profound discovery of many worlds beyond our solar system, but none analogs of our home planet Earth. Exploiting precise observational techniques, astronomers inferred the presence of well over two dozen extrasolar ...
Scientists have found, unexpectedly, tiny time capsules from billions of years in the past. The discovery involves small molecules that can apparently become trapped during the formation of large enclosed molecules known as fullerenes, or ...
What would it look like to fly over an asteroid? Spacecraft NEAR Shoemaker in orbit around asteroid 433 Eros found out earlier this month when it recorded its first fly-over sequence. The saddle region of the Sun-orbiting space-mountain appears ...
If you could look at Venus with radar eyes - this is what you might see. This computer reconstruction of the surface of Venus was created from data from the Magellan spacecraft. Magellan orbited Venus and used radar to map our neighboring ...
The Lunar Orbiter 1 spacecraft was launched in 1966 to map the lunar surface in preparation for the Apollo moon landings. NASA's plucky robotic explorer performed its job well and pioneered this classic view of the Earth poised above the lunar ...
Gamma rays are the most energetic form of light, packing a million or more times the energy of visible light photons. What if you could see gamma rays? If you could, the familiar skyscape of steady stars would be replaced by some of the most ...
What's inside Mars? From orbit, the Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) spacecraft has recorded detailed images of the red planet since July 1997. Still, its cameras can not look beneath the surface. But minute changes in the spacecraft's orbital velocity ...
When a meteorite strikes the Moon, the energy of the impact melts some of the splattering rock, a fraction of which might cool into tiny glass beads. Many of these glass beads were present in lunar soil samples returned to Earth by the Apollo ...