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Silent Hill
Credit: NASA
Monday, January 3, 2011 Spirit — the first of two NASA Mars Exploration Rovers — landed on Mars Jan. 4, 2004. This image shows the path the rover traveled on its way to the "Columbia Hills." Since March 22, 2010, however, Spirit has not responded to commands from Earth.
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When the Sun Hits Your Eye Like a Partially Eaten Pizza Pie
Credit: Gianluca Masi
Tuesday, January 4, 2011 The moon blocked about 61 percent of the sun over Rome, where this image was taken. In Sweden, where the eclipse was at its maximum, the moon blocked about 80 percent of the sun's disk. This was the first of four partial solar eclipses in 2011
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I'm Your Venus, I'm Your Fire
Credit: NASA/JPL/USGS
Wednesday, January 5, 2011 Researchers created this hemispheric view of Venus using more than a decade's worth of radar investigations culminating in the 1990-1994 Magellan mission. The planet's North Pole centers the image, color-coded to represent elevation.
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Watcher of the Skies
Credit: ESO/José Francisco Salgado
Thursday, January 6, 2011 The European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) stands on a mountaintop in the Chilean Atacama Desert. The plane of the Milky Way appears to cut between two of the four Unit Telescopes of the VLT.
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Sky Like an Eagle
Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA
Friday, January 7, 2011 This Hubble Space Telescope image shows a section of the Eagle Nebula, specifically NGC 6611, an open star cluster that formed about 5.5 million years ago, and lies approximately 6500 light-years from Earth. It is a young cluster containing many hot, blue stars which cause the surrounding Eagle Nebula to glow brightly. The cluster and nebula together are also known as Messier 16.
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Wild Youth
Credit: Jean-Charles Cuillandre (CFHT) & Giovanni Anselmi (Coelum)
Monday, January 10, 2011: SH2-140, a region of spent star formation, lies 2,700 light years away from Earth. The young star cluster has freed itself from its natal shroud. Massive blue stars in the cluster indicate it is less than 10 million years old.
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Just My Imagination
Credit: NASA/Kepler Mission/Dana Berry
Tuesday, January 11, 2011: This artist's conception imagines the view from Kepler-10b, a planet newly discovered by the Kepler spacecraft in January 2011. Kepler-10b orbits a star 560 light years from our solar system, is a rocky planet with a mass 4.6 times that of Earth, and has a diameter 1.4 times that of Earth. Unlike Earth, Kepler-10b's daytime temperature may exceed 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit.
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The Snowy Day
Credit: NASA/Jeff Schmaltz, MODIS Rapid Response Team at NASA GSFC
Wednesday, January 12, 2011: The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA's Terra satellite captured this image of the winter storm over the northeastern United States and southeastern Canada on December 28, 2010, that brought up to 32 inches (80 centimeters) of snow. Clouds appear as areas of smooth whiteness, while snow on the ground has a mottled texture.
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The Line Begins to Blur
Credit: Iztok Boncina/ESO
Thursday, January 13, 2011: Stars appear to rotate around the southern celestial pole at the European Southern Observatory’s La Silla Observatory in northern Chile. The fuzziness in the trails on the right is caused by the Magellanic Clouds, two small galaxies neighboring the Milky Way. The dome at lower left houses ESO’s 3.6-metre telescope and HARPS (High Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Searcher). The rectangular building at lower right contains the 0.25-meter TAROT telescope.
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Is There Anything Good Inside of You?
Credit: NASA/Frank Michaux
Friday, January 14, 2011: Workers have set up platforms to examine the intertank of space shuttle Discovery's external fuel tank in December 2010, inside the Vehicle Assembly Building at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The intertank connects the liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen tanks.
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Laughing All the Way
Credit: NASA
Monday, January 17, 2011: Guion S. Bluford, Jr. (b. 1942) became the first African-American to fly in space onboard space shuttle Challenger in 1983, on mission STS-8. Of that first launch, he recalled: "When the clock counted down and we took off, I just laughed, it was so much fun." Here, Bluford excrcises on a treadmill. Interestingly, actress Nichelle Nichols, Star Trek's Lt. Uhura, recruited him into NASA's astronaut ranks.
--Tom Chao
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I See Red
Credit: NASA, ESA, M. Regan and B. Whitmore (STScI), R. Chandar (University of Toledo), S. Beckwith (STScI), and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)
Tuesday, January 18, 2011: The Whirlpool Galaxy, AKA spiral galaxy M51, sports a new look when seen in near-infrared light by the Hubble Space Telescope. With most of the starlight removed, this image provides the sharpest view of the dust structure of the galaxy to date.
--Tom Chao
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Ice on a Volcano
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/USGS/University of Arizona
Wednesday, January 19, 2011: This topographic image shows an area of Saturn's moon Titan, known as Sotra Facula, which may harbor an ice volcano (cryovolcano). Finger-like flows suggest the presence of cryovolcanism. NASA's Cassini spacecraft collected data for this false-color image in which heights are exaggerated by a factor of 10.
--Tom Chao
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Part of the Hole
Credit: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin (G. Neukum)
Thursday, January 20, 2011: ESA's Mars Express spacecraft used its High-Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) to capture this image of the Schiaparelli impact basin on Mars. This view only shows a small part of the basin’s northwestern rim cutting diagonally across the image (from top left to bottom right), and a smaller 26-mile (42-kilometer)-diameter crater embedded in its rim.
--Tom Chao
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Sun Strokes
Credit: ESO/R. Fosbury/T. Trygg/D. Rabanus
Friday, January 21, 2011: From the Chilean plateau of Chajnantor, where ESO's highly-advanced Atacama Pathfinder Experiment (APEX) telescope stands, comes an unique image created with very simple components. This "solargraph" shows trails of the sun in the sky taken over a six-month period from mid-December 2009 until the southern winter solstice in June 2010. The pinhole camera that made the image used a plastic film canister and a piece of photographic paper. After exposure, the paper was scanned into a computer, where the colors were reversed. The trails reveal very few clouds in the sky over Chajnantor.
--Tom Chao
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Big Star(s) in Space
Credit: NASA, ESA, and J. Maíz Apellániz (Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía, Spain)
Monday, January 24, 2011: Pismis 24-1 shines brightest at the top center of this image, which displays the NGC 6357 nebula in Scorpius. Researchers previously considered Pismis 24-1 the most massive star in the galaxy at 200-300 solar masses, far above the current theorized limit of 150 solar masses. However, Hubble and ground-based telescopes have discovered that Pismis 24-1 is not merely a binary star system, but it is composed of a tight binary star system and a third star, meaning the individual stars cannot have broken the mass record.
--Tom Chao
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Superblast!
Credit: NASA/CXC/Wesleyan Univ./R.Kilgard et al.
Tuesday, January 25, 2011: Messier 82 (M82) galaxy, known as a starburst galaxy, produces stars at rate tens or even hundreds of times faster than in normal galaxies. Astronomers believe that a brush with neighboring galaxy M81 millions of years ago, creating shock waves, set off this blast of star formation.
--Tom Chao
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My Ever Changing Loops
Credit: NASA/SDO
Wednesday, January 26, 2011: Magnetic loops emanating from the sun break apart and reconnect in this profile view taken by the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO), in January 2011. Regions like this with intense magnetic activity often appear as sunspots in filtered light.
--Tom Chao
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Remembering Apollo 1
Credit: NASA
Thursday, January 27, 2011: Astronauts Virgil Grissom, Edward White, and Roger Chaffee lost their lives when a fire struck during testing for the AS-204 mission on January 27, 1967. The flight would have been the first Apollo manned mission, and NASA later renamed the mission Apollo 1 in honor of the astronauts. Following the disaster, NASA made substantial changes to increase safety.
--Tom Chao
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Remembering the Fallen
Credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls
Friday, January 28, 2011: NASA Administrator Charles Bolden places a wreath at Arlington National Cemetery as part of NASA's Day of Remembrance, Thursday, Jan. 27, 2011. The memorial recognizes the Apollo 1, Challenger and Columbia crews, along with other NASA personnel lost in the course of space exploration. The Challenger disaster occurred 25 years ago on January 28, 1986.
--Tom Chao
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Aliens Ate My … Optima?
Credit: Kia Motors
Monday, January 31, 2011: Kia Motors hopes its Super Bowl TV commercial will inspire viewers to purchase an Optima midsize sedan. The 60-second spot, entitled "One Epic Ride," features a science fiction theme, including characters such as space aliens, Poseidon, and an Aztec-style chief.
--Tom Chao
