Bouncing Off the Satellites
Friday, Nov. 15, 2013: On Nov 12, 2013, NASA astronaut Rick Mastracchio tweeted his first photo taken aboard the International Space Station. He wrote: "My 1st tweet of pic from ISS! Bounced off 3 satellites, thru 2 email accounts, & 2 round trips to ISS. My Soyuz pic.twitter.com/8xY7WSWl8o" As a member of the Expedition 38 crew, he will stay aboard the station until May 2014. [See more mission photos at Photos: Space Station's Expedition 37/38 Mission in Pictures.]
— Tom Chao
Fly Away
Monday, Nov. 18, 2013: On Nov. 15, 2013, SOHO spacecraft's coronagraph captured an cloud of ionized gas and magnetic field which expanded and flew from the sun at about the 10 o’clock position. The cloud was probably caused by the same magnetic field disruption that produced an eruptive prominence seen earlier in extreme ultra-violet light on Nov. 13, 2013. The image of the sun in the center of the blacked-out circle was provided by the Solar Dynamics Observatory. [See more solar images at Solar Max: Amazing Sun Storm Photos of 2013.]
— Tom Chao
Atmosphere
Tuesday, Nov. 19, 2013: Clouds in Saturn’s atmosphere trace delicate shapes. Cassini spacecraft captured this image on Aug. 12, 2013, using a spectral filter sensitive to wavelengths of near-infrared light. A portion of the rings is also visible. This view looks toward the sunlit side of the rings from about 18 degrees above the ringplane, when the spacecraft was at a distance of approximately 994,000 miles (1.6 million kilometers) from Saturn.
— Tom Chao
White Bird Must Fly
Wednesday, Nov. 20, 2013: Birds flap and fly in the air while in the background an Atlas V rocket carrying NASA’s Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN (MAVEN) spacecraft launches from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on Monday, Nov. 18, 2013, in Florida. MAVEN represents the first spacecraft devoted to understanding the Martian upper atmosphere.
— Tom Chao
Just Out of Thin Air
Thursday, Nov. 21, 2013: Dr. Koichi Wakata represents the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) as a Flight Engineer on International Space Station (ISS) Expedition 38 and the Commander of Expedition 39. He will be the first Japanese astronaut to command the ISS. On Nov. 17, 2013, he tweeted this image of the moon taken aboard the ISS. He wrote: “Moon rising out of the beautiful thin earth atmosphere. pic.twitter.com/h416Hpllmy” [See our gallery of Expedition 37/38 images.]
— Tom Chao
John Fitzgerald Kennedy, 1917-1963
Friday, Nov. 22, 2013: A color guard and Launch Operations Center Director Kurt Debus (right) welcome President John F. Kennedy to the Cape Canaveral Missile Test Annex Skid Strip on Sept. 11, 1962. The assassination of President Kennedy occurred 50 years ago today, on Nov. 22, 1963, cutting short the life of the leader whose vision set America’s feet on the path to the moon. On Nov. 29, 1963, the center was renamed the John F. Kennedy Space Center in his honor. [See Photos: John F. Kennedy's NASA Legacy.]
— Tom Chao
In a State of Flux
Monday, Nov. 25, 2013: Spiral galaxy NGC 7497 lies in the constellation Pegasus, about 60 million light-years away from Earth. The brownish haze that partially obscures the galaxy is the Integrated Flux Nebula. [See our gallery of nebulas.]
— Tom Chao
Fly! Be Free!
Tuesday, Nov. 26, 2013: Three small CubeSats float above the Earth after
Chase the Stars
Wednesday, Nov. 27, 2013: The familiar Pleiades Cluster, which was already
Beneath Thy Shining Skies
Thursday, Nov. 28, 2013: Canada's automated aurora camera tweeted this photo
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