Apollo 11 Catching Some Sun

Apollo 11 Catching Some Sun



Bright sunlightglints and long dark shadow dramatize thisimage of th lunar surfacetaken by Apollo 11 astronaut NeilArmstrong, the first to wal on the Moon.Pictured is the mission's lunar module, the Eagle,and spacesuited lunar module pilot Buzz Aldri unfurling a long sheet of foil also known as th Solar Wind Collector.Exposed facing the Sun, the foil trapped atoms streaming outwardin the solar wind, ultimately catching a sample o material from the Sun itself.Along with moon rocks and lunar soil samples, the solar wind collector wasreturned for analysisin earthbound laboratories.

Galileo's Europa

Galileo's Europa



Launched in 1989 and looping through the jovian system since late1995, the voyage of NASA' Galileospacecraft will soon come to an end.The spacecraft has bee targeted to plungedirectl intoJupiter this Sunday, September 21st, at about 30 miles per second.Its components will be vaporized in thegas giant's outer atmosphere.While Galileo's long voyage of explorationhas resulted in a spectacula scientificlegacy,the spacecraft's ultimate fate is related to perhapsits mos tantalizingdiscovery -- strong evidence for liquid oceanbeneath the frozen surface of Jupiter' moonEuropa.Galileo is now almost completely out of fuel for maneuvers,so this intentional collision with Jupiter will preventany unintentional future collision with Europaand the possibility of contaminating the jovian moon withmicrobes from Eart hardy enough to survive in interplanetary space Colorimage data from the Galileo mission recorded between1995 and 1998 was used to create this depiction ofEuropa's cracked and icy surface The insetshows dark reddish, disrupted regions dubbed Thera and Thrace.

Saturn by Three

Saturn by Three



Thes threeviews of Saturn wererecorded by the Hubble Space Telescope on March 7th of thisyear, as the southern hemisphere of the solar system's most gorgeousplanet reached its maximum 27 degree tilttoward Earth.The images use to constructthe false-color pictures were madethrough a combination o filters covering theelectromagnetic spectrum from ultraviolet (top), to visible (middle)and infrared (bottom) wavelengths highlighting differen features in the Saturnian atmospheric bands and rings.Well known for its bright ringsystem and large,mysterious moon Titan,gas gian Saturn isalso a planet with a dynamic atmosphere and high-speed winds.In fact, in the 1980s Voyagerspacecraft measured equatorialwinds of over 1,000 miles per hour.Giant storm systems,comparable in size to planet Earth itself, have been see erupting in Saturn's cloud tops.