Backdropped by Earth's white clouds and blue water, the space shuttle Discovery
can be seen approaching the International Space Station for a final time on Feb. 26.
A Russian Progress spacecraft that is docked to the station points downward toward
the shuttle in this photo, which was captured by a station crew member.
making its final visit before being parked at a museum.
Swirls of ice
Ostrov Shikotan is a volcanic island at the southern end of the Kuril chain, off the coast
of the Russian Far East. Shikotan lies along the extreme southern edge of winter sea ice
in the Northern Hemisphere. An imager on NASA's Earth Observing-1 (EO-1)
satellite captured this natural-color image of Shikotan on Feb. 14. The island
is surrounded by swirling shapes of ghostly blue-gray sea ice.
Pool practice
With the aid of scuba divers, spacesuit-clad astronaut trainees take part in drills
in a pool at Russia's Star City cosmonaut training center outside Moscow on Feb. 18.
Underwater training simulates conditions of weightlessness and is a part of
space crew training.
Monster blast from the sun
When an M-3.6-class flare occurred near the edge of the sun, it blew out a gorgeous,
waving mass of erupting plasma that swirled and twisted over a 90-minute period on
Feb. 24. The event was captured in extreme ultraviolet light by NASA's Solar Dynamics
Observatory. Some of the material blew out into space, and other portions fell back to the
surface.
Saturn's northern storm
As part of its routine monitoring of Saturn's atmosphere, the Cassini orbiter took the
photos needed to compose this false-color composite view of the storm reaching
across much of the planet's temperate northern latitudes on Feb. 4. The view is made
up of three images taken through infrared, green and blue filters.
Getting ready for a walk
Discovery astronaut Alvin Drew prepares to go on a spacewalk in this Feb. 28 picture,
which shows an area partially inside and partially outside the International Space Station's
Quest air lock. Drew and fellow spacewalker Steve Bowen took on a variety of maintenance
tasks during the shuttle Discovery's final visit to the space station.
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Space Station, leaving an astronaut stuck with an 800-pound (363-kilogram) pump in
his hands for nearly a half-hour. Good thing it was weightless.
Welcomed with open arms
The International Space Station's robotic arm is extended toward a Japanese
cargo ship known as Kounotori 2. The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency says
the transport vehicle was brought in for docking on Jan. 27. The vehicle carried nearly
six tons of food, water, clothing and experimental equipment for the station's astronauts.
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Month in Space: February 2011
An unmanned Japanese cargo spaceship safely arrived at the International Space
An unmanned Japanese cargo spaceship safely arrived at the International Space
Station on Thursday, delivering tons of provisions for the station and its crew members.
Light show
The northern lights are seen in the sky above the village of Ersfjordbotn near
Tromso in northern Norway, early on the night on Feb. 21. Such auroral displays
are caused by the interaction between electrically charged particles from the sun
and gas molecules in the upper atmosphere of the Earth, about 60 miles up.
Ready for landing
This enhanced-color image shows Holden Crater on Mars, one of the four candidates
being considered as a landing site for NASA's Curiosity rover. The rover is due for
launch later this year. The high-resolution camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance
Orbiter, known as HiRISE, has taken color imagery of all four sites so that scientists
can decide which site is most promising. This view of Holden Crater was released
on Feb. 16.
Walking on a mock Mars
A mock mission to Mars "landed" on a simulated Red Planet on Feb. 14, and in the
days afterward, volunteer crew members went on three make-believe Marswalks.
The simulated surface was actually a giant sandpit, built inside a Moscow research
institute. The exercise was the climax of a 520-day isolation experiment aimed at
studying how a future real-life crew would handle the psychological stresses of a
Mars mission.
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Red Planet landscape marking the halfway point in an ambitious 520-day isolation
experiment to test the strains of interplanetary travel.
A ring of black holes
This composite image, released Feb. 9, shows Arp 147, a pair of interacting galaxies
located about 430 million light years from Earth. X-ray observations from NASA's
Chandra X-ray Observatory are shown in pink, and visible-light readings from the
Hubble Space Telescope are shown in red, green and blue. Scientists say the pink
bursts in the ring-shaped galaxies are emissions from black holes.
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Head-on galactic collision is an impressive sight
From the perspective of any random star in a galaxy, a head-on galactic collision
From the perspective of any random star in a galaxy, a head-on galactic collision
isn't a particularly violent event. Stars are spaced so widely apart that they won't
actually collide with each other. Instead, a galaxy collision
A grand galaxy
This Hubble Space Telescope image, released on Feb.17, shows the majestic disk
of stars and dust lanes in the spiral galaxy NGC 2841. A bright cusp of starlight marks
the galaxy's center.
Jumpin' Jupiter
Particle debris in Jupiter's atmosphere is seen after an object hurtled into the atmosphere
on July 19, 2009, in these infrared images obtained from NASA's Infrared Telescope
Facility in Mauna Kea, Hawaii, and released by NASA on Jan. 26, 2011. The image
on the left was taken July 20, 2009, and the image on the right was taken on Aug.16, 2009.
The impact and its after-effects can be seen as the bright spot on the lower left of the
July 20 image and as the bright smudge on the lower left of the Aug.16
A stunning sight
The stunning icy landscape of northern Canada was photographed from International
Space Station on Jan. 11. Italian astronaut Paolo Nespoli sent the picture down to
Earth via his Flickr account (magisstra).
Eyes on the sky
Four antennas of the European Southern Observatory's ALMA array of radio telescopes
in Chile gaze up at the star-filled night sky in anticipation of the work that lies ahead.
The moon lights the scene on the right, while the band of the Milky Way stretches
across the upper left. This photograph was ESO's "Picture of the Week" for Feb. 21.
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