A crescent Enceladus appears with Saturn’s rings in this Cassini spacecraft view of the moon.

The famed jets of water ice emanating from the south polar region of the moon are faintly visible here. Lit terrain seen here is on the trailing hemisphere of Enceladus (504 kilometers across). North on Enceladus is up.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Jan. 4, 2012. The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 181,000 miles (291,000 kilometers) from Enceladus. Image scale is 1 mile (2 kilometers) per pixel.

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging team is based at the Space Science Institute, Boulder, Colorado.

Credit: NASA

An outstanding photo from NASA … with the International Space Station seen as a small object in upper left of this image of the moon in the early evening of January 4th in the skies over the Houston area, flying at an altitude of 390.8 kilometers (242.8 miles). The space station can occasionally be seen in the night sky with the naked eye and a pair of field binoculars.

Image credit: NASA

Say Hello to Curiosity, NASA’s next Mars rover that’s about to be launched on Saturday, Nov. 26 from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida.

NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity rover, a mobile robot for investigating Mars’ past or present ability to sustain microbial life. In this picture, the rover examines a rock on Mars with a set of tools at the end of the rover’s arm, which extends about 2 meters (7 feet). Two instruments on the arm can study rocks up close. Also, a drill can collect sample material from inside of rocks and a scoop can pick up samples of soil. The arm can sieve the samples and deliver fine powder to instruments inside the rover for thorough analysis.

The mast, or rover’s “head,” rises to about 2.1 meters (6.9 feet) above ground level. This mast supports two remote-sensing instruments: the Mast Camera, or “eyes,” for stereo color viewing of surrounding terrain and material collected by the arm; and, the ChemCam instrument, which is a laser that vaporizes material from rocks up to about 9 meters (30 feet) away and determines what elements the rocks are made of.

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Soyuz VS01 on the launch pad … Say hello to Galileo.

Soyuz VS01, the first Soyuz flight from Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana, will lift off on 20 October 2011. The rocket will carry the first two satellites of Europe’s Galileo navigation system into orbit.

For detailed information about this historic launch, you can visit ESA’s website.

Credits: europeanspaceagency

Incredible view of Perseid meteor from the ISS.

Denizens of planet Earth watched this year’s Perseid meteor shower by looking up into the moonlit night sky. But this remarkable view captured by astronaut Ron Garan looks down on a Perseid meteor. From Garan’s perspective onboard the International Space Station orbiting at an altitude of about 380 kilometers, the Perseid meteors streak below, swept up dust left from comet Swift-Tuttle heated to incandescence.

The glowing comet dust grains are traveling at about 60 kilometers per second through the denser atmosphere around 100 kilometers above Earth’s surface. In this case, the foreshortened meteor flash is right of frame center, below the curving limb of the Earth and a layer of greenish airglow. Out of the frame, the Sun is on the horizon beyond one of the station’s solar panel arrays at the upper right. Seen above the meteor near the horizon is bright star Arcturus and a star field that includes the constellations Bootes and Corona Borealis.

The image was recorded on August 13 while the space station orbited above an area of China approximately 400 kilometers to the northwest of Beijing.

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Astronaut Captures Fantastic Shot of Aurora From Space

A crew member floating inside the International Space Station snapped this long-exposure photo of the southern lights dancing through Earth’s atmosphere on July 16.

Such light shows occur when high-energy solar particles corralled by Earth’s magnetic field slam into atmospheric gas near the planet’s poles (in this case, somewhere over Antarctica).

At left is part of the space station’s solar arrays, and at center is space shuttle Atlantis’ robotic arm and inspection boom, which is backlit by the moon. One of Atlantis‘ wings, orbital maneuvering system pods and payload bay doors is seen at right.

This is probably one of the last-ever shots of the Space Shuttle in space. After undocking from the ISS, it came back to Earth and landed on Kennedy Space Center on Thursday, July 21 at 5:57 a.m. EDT.

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See the position of the Space Shuttle Atlantis, the International Space Station and the Hubble Space Telescope as they orbit the Earth.

Click the picture or here to see each spacecraft’s position. While the space shuttle is getting ready for retirement, the other two will remain on the map for a while …

Source: BBC News