Space at
your fingertips.
"I want to know why the universe exist, why there is something greater than nothing."
Steven Hawking
Scientist, Space Lover
What's happening to this Sun-crossing rocket? The SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, visible on the upper left, launched only about one minute before this amazing image was captured. As it rose to low Earth orbit from Cape Canaveral, Florida, USA, in late May, the rocket became supersonic before it crossed the disk of the distant Sun -- from the perspective of the well-placed photographer. The spacecraft's high speed caused bow-shaped compressed-air shockwaves to form across leading surfaces, with at least three visible even outside the Sun's disk because they refract sunlight. The trailing exhaust caused turbulence visible on the lower right. None of this was damaging to the robotic Starlink 10-53 mission, which delivered 29 communications satellites to low Earth orbit as planned. And if that isn't amazing enough - the Sun had spots! Sky Surprise: What picture did APOD feature on your birthday? (after 1995)
This shadowy landscape of majestic mountains and icy plains stretches toward the horizon on a small, distant world. It was captured from a range of about 18,000 kilometers when New Horizons looked back toward Pluto, 15 minutes after the spacecraft's closest approach on July 14, 2015. The dramatic, low-angle, near-twilight scene follows rugged mountains formally known as Norgay Montes from foreground left, and Hillary Montes along the horizon, giving way to smooth Sputnik Planum at right. Layers of Pluto's tenuous atmosphere are also revealed in the backlit view. With a strangely familiar appearance, the frigid terrain likely includes ices of nitrogen and carbon monoxide with water-ice mountains rising up to 3,500 meters (11,000 feet). That's comparable in height to the majestic mountains of planet Earth. The Plutonian landscape is 380 kilometers (230 miles) across.
Launched in the early 1970s Pioneer 10 and 11 were appropriately named - becoming the first spacecraft to travel through the asteroid belt, first to fly by Jupiter and Saturn, and the first human artifacts to venture beyond the solar system. Now coasting through interstellar space, they carry with them greetings in the form of a gold anodized plaque with symbolic drawings as illustrated above. The male and female figures are drawn to the same scale as the Pioneer spacecraft shown behind them. Immediately to the left is a map of the position of the sun with respect to nearby pulsars and the center of the galaxy while below is a drawing of the solar system indicating the planet of origin. In the upper left is a schematic of two fundamental states of the hydrogen atom. These diagrams along with other details of the plaque were designed by Carl Sagan of Cornell University and are intended to be decipherable by spacefaring extraterrestrial civilizations.
Expanse