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| On Feb. 12, 1984, astronaut Brice McCandless tested out a nitrogen jet-propelled backpack called the Manned Maneuvering Unit. As the space shuttle Challenger orbited hundreds of miles above Earth, McCandless flew 320 feet (97 meters) from the ship and hovered alone in the black of space. |
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| The STS-135 crew got its last glimpse of the International Space Station through the Space Shuttle Atlantis' windows on Tuesday, July 19. Atlantis landed at Kennedy Space Center at 5:57 a.m. EDT on July 21, marking the end of the space shuttle era. Atlantis will retire to the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex. |
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| The European Space Agency's CryoSat satellite orbits an icy Earth. The satellite monitors changes in the thickness of marine ice floating in the polar |
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| From the International Space Station, the aurora seems to set the Earth alight with green fire. This photo, snapped by the Expedition 32 crew aboard the ISS on July 15, 2012, offers a stunning view of the aurora australis, or southern lights. (That's Canadarm2, a robot arm extending off the station, in the foreground.) The southern lights, and their cousin the northern lights, occur when particles from the sun hit atmospheric gases, exciting the gas molecules and creating the gorgeous, twisting colors that can be seen at high and low latitudes. |
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| The Space Shuttle Endeavour is docked with the International Space Station one last time in this May 28, 2011 photograph. Below, city lights brighten the night side of Earth. The STS-134 astronauts left the station the next day on May 29, and they are scheduled to land in Florida on Wednesday, June 2011. |
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| northwestern Europe, congratulations. London is the large bright spot in the lower left-hand corner; across the dark English Channel is Paris, near the center of the photograph. Brussels is the large dark orange area to the left of Paris, and smaller, brighter Amsterdam sits to Paris' left. Rounding out the spacebound tour of European cities is Milan, which is visible as a line of lights alongside the dark Alps in the upper right corner of the photo. |
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| Add captionThe NASA GOES-13 satellite captured a snapshot of three tropical storms (and a tropical wave) on July 22. Hurricane Dora is in the Pacific, while Bret and Cindy whirl in the Atlantic. Low #1, a tropical wave, has brought rain to parts of the Caribbean. None of the storms are expected to pose a major threat to land. |
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| In this photo taken by an Expedition 22 crew member in 2010, roughly 62 miles (100 kilometers) of the Houston metropolitan area are visible east to west. Houston is rotated from the view normally seen on maps |
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| on April 20, 2010, an explosion rocked the Deepwater Horizon oil rig, marking the beginning of a three-month long oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. The spill turned the Mississippi delta into an oily canvas, as seen in this May 24, 2010 image from the Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) instrument on NASA's Terra spacecraft. Vegetation looks red, while the reflective oil appears silver. |
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| the shuttle and the space station began their post-undocking relative separation, Expedition 23 flight engineer Soichi Noguchi photographed the underside |
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