Space Image of the Day Gallery (March 2015)

News
By Tom Chao
published

One Year in Space Begins

NASA/Bill Ingalls

Monday, March 30, 2015: The Soyuz TMA-16M spacecraft lifts off on its way to the International Space Station from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, ferrying Expedition 43 NASA astronaut Scott Kelly, and Russian cosmonauts Mikhail Kornienko, and Gennady Padalka of the Russian Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos), March 28, 2015, Kazakh time (March 27 EDT). Kelly and Kornienko will spend one full year in space as the one-year crew. [See full coverage.]

— Tom Chao

We Meet Again

NASA/JPL-Caltech

Tuesday, March 31, 2015: On January 30, 2015, NEOWISE spacecraft spotted comet C/2014 Q2 (Lovejoy) for a second time, as the space-traveling object came closest to our sun in its 14,000-year orbit, at a solar distance of 120 million miles (193 million km.). NEOWISE visually recorded the comet over 20 times during its perihelion passage in late January 2015, from a distance of 70 million miles (112 million kilometers). The blue tail, consisting mainly of ionized particles and small dust, stretches away in the anti-sunward direction.

— Tom Chao

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Tom Chao
Tom Chao
Tom Chao has contributed to SPACE.com as a producer and writer since 2000. As a writer and editor, he has worked for the Voyager Company, Time Inc. New Media, HarperCollins and Worth Publishers. He has a bachelor’s degree in Cinema Production from the University of Southern California, and a master’s degree from NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study. To find out what his latest project is, you can follow Tom on Google+.