Fifty years ago this Sunday (February 7, 1971), the crew of Apollo 14 left lunar orbit and headed for home. They watched this Earthrise from their command module Kittyhawk. With Earth’s sunlit crescent just peeking over the lunar horizon, the cratered terrain in the foreground is along the lunar farside. Of course, while orbiting the […]
Apollo 14 arrived n lunar orbit on Feb. 4, 1971 to prepare for the landing in and exploration of the Fra Mauro highlands. via NASA https://ift.tt/39OY4p2
Fifty years ago this Friday, Apollo 14’s Lunar Module Antares landed on the Moon. Toward the end of the stay astronaut Ed Mitchell snapped a series of photos of the lunar surface while looking out a window, assembled into this detailed mosaic by Apollo Lunar Surface Journal editor Eric Jones. The view looks across the […]
The waning gibbous moon is pictured the day after its full Moon phase as the International Space Station orbited 264 miles above China near the Mongolian border. via NASA https://ift.tt/3ayzjwL
Was the oldest known rock on Earth found on the Moon? Quite possibly. The story opens with the Apollo 14 lunar mission. Lunar sample 14321, a large rock found in Cone crater by astronaut Alan Shepard, when analyzed back on Earth, was found to have a fragment that was a much better match to Earth […]
Victor Glover, who has accumulated 3,000 flight hours in more than 40 aircraft, over 400 carrier arrested landings and 24 combat missions, took his first spacewalk on Thursday, Jan. 28, 2021. via NASA https://ift.tt/3oHbrMu
Meteors can be colorful. While the human eye usually cannot discern many colors, cameras often can. Pictured is a Quadrantids meteor captured by camera over Missouri, USA, early this month that was not only impressively bright, but colorful. The radiant grit, likely cast off by asteroid 2003 EH1, blazed a path across Earth’s atmosphere. Colors […]
The STS-107 crewmembers strike a ‘flying’ pose for their traditional in-flight crew portrait in the SPACEHAB Research Double Module aboard the Space Shuttle Columbia. via NASA https://ift.tt/3jhUpUd
Have you ever seen a halo around the Moon? This fairly common sight occurs when high thin clouds containing millions of tiny ice crystals cover much of the sky. Each ice crystal acts like a miniature lens. Because most of the crystals have a similar elongated hexagonal shape, light entering one crystal face and exiting […]
Rocks from space hit Earth every day. The larger the rock, though, the less often Earth is struck. Many kilograms of space dust pitter to Earth daily. Larger bits appear initially as a bright meteor. Baseball-sized rocks and ice-balls streak through our atmosphere daily, most evaporating quickly to nothing. Significant threats do exist for rocks […]