Monday, May 2, 2011: Only a computer artist could present NASA's Voyager spacecraft the way it appears here, in eerie perfection. The boom to the right holds the Cosmic Ray Science instrument, Low Energy Charged Particle detector, the Infrared Spectrometer and Radiometer, Ultraviolet Spectrometer, Photopolarimeter and Wide and Narrow Angle Cameras. The bright gray square below provides an optical calibration plate for the instruments. The Golden Record, containing images and sounds from Earth, appears as the yellow circle on the main spacecraft body. The dish serves as the spacecraft's high-gain antenna for communications with Earth. The magnetometer boom stretches out to the upper left. The radio isotope thermoelectric generators, Voyager's power source, hang on the lower left. The two Voyager spacecraft are identical. Voyager 2 launched on Aug. 20, 1977. Voyager 1 launched on Sept. 5, 1977. Both have approached the edge of the solar system around April 2011, and continue into interstellar space.
—Tom Chao
Tuesday, May 3, 2011: President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama share a laugh with STS-134 space shuttle Endeavor commander Mark Kelly (with back to camera), right, and shuttle astronauts, from left, Andrew Feustel, European Space Agency’s Roberto Vittori, Michael Fincke, Gregory H. Johnson, and Greg Chamitoff, after their launch was scrubbed, Friday, April 29, 2011, at Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla.
—Tom Chao
Wednesday, May 4, 2011: European researchers tested an ESA rover, a spacesuit mockup and a medical monitoring system April 18-22, at Rio Tinto in Andalucia, southern Spain. The "astronaut" sits at the controls of the Eurobot Ground Prototype, simultaneously testing the Aouda.X spacesuit mockup along with the Long Term Medical Survey System (LTMS). The Spanish weather supplied quite a bit more rain than one would expect on Mars, however.
—Tom Chao
Thursday, May 5, 2011: Fifty years ago today, on May 5, 1961, astronaut Alan Shepard became the first American in space. The Freedom 7 spacecraft carried Shepard on a suborbital flight that lasted 15 minutes. He underwent a physical examination prior to the first marned suborbital flight, shown here.
—Tom Chao
Friday, May 6, 2011: This Hubble Space Telescope image of the M15 Globular Cluster spans about 120 light years. Over 100,000 stars make up this relic from the early years of our galaxy, and the ball of stars continues to orbit the Milky Way's center. M15 lies about 35,000 light years away toward the constellation of the Winged Horse (Pegasus).
—Tom Chao
Monday, May 9, 2011: On the morning of May 1, 2011, four planets and the moon could be seen in the sky over the Paranal observing site of the European Southern Observatory, in the Chilean desert of Atacama. From top to bottom between the left and center telescopes in the photo are Venus (large and bright), Mercury (beneath Venus to the right), Jupiter and Mars (both closer to the horizon). The moon shines at the left. For those keeping score, the photo shows a fifth planet: the Earth.
—Tom Chao
Tuesday, May 10, 2011: This ultraviolet image of the sun shows large sunspot group AR 9169 as the bright area near the horizon. The relatively cool dark regions have temperatures of thousands of degrees Celsius, in contrast to the bright glowing gas flowing around the sunspots, which have a temperature of over one million degrees Celsius. Large sunspot group AR 9169 moved across the sun during September 2000.
—Tom Chao
Wednesday, May 11, 2011: Nili Fossae on Mars is a graben system, a graben being a depressed area of land bounded by faults on at least two sides. Mars Express spacecraft took this image on February 8, 2008, using the High-Resolution Stereo Camera.
—Tom Chao
Thursday, May 12, 2011: The three nebulae in this image may appear close together, but in actuality they reside at different distances from the Earth. Nebula NGC 1491 glows on the right side of the image, SH 2-209 sits on the left side and BFS 34 lies in between. NGC 1491 and BFS 34 are part of the same cloud complex at distance of about 10,700 light-years away in the Perseus arm of the Milky Way Galaxy. SH 2-209 lives farther away at about 16,000 light-years distance, located in the outer arm of the Milky Way.
—Tom Chao
Friday, May 13, 2011: A landscape that looks eerie and remote is really Russia's Bezymianny volcano rendered in a false-color image. The volcano erupted on April 14, 2011. In this infrared photo, lava appears red on the summit and to the south-east. Bare rock and ash are gray, and snow and ice appear cyan. The Advanced Land Imager (ALI) aboard the Earth Observing-1 (EO-1) satellite acquired this image on April 22, 2011.
—Tom Chao
Monday, May 16, 2011: Under a blue sky, space shuttle Endeavour awaited liftoff on Launch Pad 39A at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida on May 16, 2011. Mission STS-134 is the final spaceflight for Endeavour.
—Tom Chao
Monday, May 16, 2011: Bonus Image of the Day! Space shuttle Endeavour lifts off beside the seaside at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Endeavour began its final flight, the STS-134 mission, to the International Space Station at 8:56 a.m. EDT on May 16, 2011.
—Tom Chao
Tuesday, May 17, 2011: This image taken by the Cassini spacecraft highlights the thinness of Saturn's rings, only about one kilometer thick. Saturn's moon Titan looms over the thin rings, while the smaller moon Enceladus appears very tiny on the far right.
—Tom Chao
Wednesday, May 18, 2011: Opportunity rover on Mars looks away from the sun into Endurance Crater and sees its shadow. The image shows two wheels on the lower left and right, with the floor and walls of the unusual crater in the background. Although the companion Spirit rover has gotten stuck, Opportunity still continues on its long trek to expansive Endeavor crater.
—Tom Chao
Thursday, May 19, 2011: Three intrepid modern-day Montgolfiers launched aboard the BTS-1 (Balloon Transport System) on May 8, 2011, making a near-space trip from Houston, TX, to the swamps of Louisiana. The three travelers, (L to R in inset) Camilla Corona SDO, Skye Bleu, and Fuzz Aldrin, rode aboard the "Inspiration" engineering module to an altitude of approximately 87,000 feet. The flight raised awareness of space education and peace, organized by Bears on Patrol, a nonprofit organization based in Carrollton, Georgia. Rescuers from Sabine Wildlife Refuge could not locate the brave explorers for five days, but finally found them. Ironically, the Inspiration capsule has gone missing during return delivery by Fedex.
—Tom Chao
Friday, May 20, 2011: Nebula NGC 3582 contains giant loops of gas that resemble solar prominences. Researchers think dying stars ejected the loops, but this stellar nursery also produces new stars. The young stars emit ultraviolet radiation that causes the gas in the nebula to glow, producing the fiery display. To make this image, Joe DePasquale combined a variety of datasets acquired by the Wide Field Imager on the MPG/ESO 2.2-meter telescope at ESO’s La Silla Observatory in Chile.
—Tom Chao
Monday, May 23, 2011: Astronomers class UGC 9128, shown here, as a dwarf irregular galaxy, It lacks a well-defined shape, and probably contains only around one hundred million stars, far fewer than are found in a large spiral galaxy such as the Milky Way. UGC 9128 lies about 8 million light-years away, in the constellation of Boötes (The Herdsman).
—Tom Chao
Tuesday, May 24, 2011:The docked space shuttle Endeavour floats above Earth's horizon and black space in this image photographed by an STS-134 crew member onboard the International Space Station, May 21, 2011 (Flight Day 6). That day had been predicted as the date of the Christian rapture, but by the time of this writing, that event had not yet taken place.
—Tom Chao
Wednesday, May 25, 2011: Japan has provided the first of twelve 7-meter antennas to the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) observatory in Chile. ALMA will have an array of fifty antennas with 12-meter diameter dishes. The 7-meter antenna is seen here at the ALMA Operations Support Facility (OSF), at an altitude of 2900 meters in the foothills of the Chilean Andes. Later it will be moved to the plateau of Chajnantor at a 5000-meter altitude.
—Tom Chao
Thursday, May 26, 2011: Star cluster NGC 2259 usually appears in visible light as a group of stars loosely clustered. However, in the infrared light captured by the WISE spacecraft, nearby gas and dust clouds emerge, blocking the view of the cluster. In the image, NGC 2259 lies in the bluish area to the left of the brightest star on the right side.
—Tom Chao
Friday, May 27, 2011: This image taken by the Expedition 27 crew aboard the International Space Station shows the Atlantic Seaboard Conurbation (ASC). A conurbation refers to a region comprised of cities, towns, and urban areas that have merged together. This image shows all of the ASC except for Boston, Mass. At upper right lies New York City, N.Y., then to the left appears Philadelphia, Pa., Baltimore, Md., and Washington, D.C. On the left-hand border lies Richmond, Va., with Norfolk, Va. near at the bottom, although neither is included in the ASC.
—Tom Chao
Monday, May 30, 2011: Spiral galaxy Messier 90, in the constellation Virgo, displays obvious interaction with the nearby smaller gallery. The galaxy's core has moved from the center of the disk, and the spiral arms show strong disturbances in several places.
—Tom Chao
Tuesday, May 31, 2011: This Hubble photo shows globular cluster Terzan 5, which possesses an exceptionally dense core. As a result, scientists think that it has one of the highest stellar collision rates for a globular cluster. While packed in at such close quarters, many stars push so close together that they form tight binary systems.
—Tom Chao
