每日一图

The crew snapped this starry nighttime shot of Rio de Janeiro and surrounding cities on the Brazilian coast, as the International Space Station orbited above São Paolo. Whhile the crew observes Earth from more than 200 miles above the planet, astronaut Bob Behnken and Commander Chris Cassidy also are concentrating on the final set of power upgrade spacewalks on the station with their next spacewalk slated for Thursday, July 16. Image Credit: NASA 当国际空间站绕圣保罗飞行时，机组人员拍摄了里约热内卢和巴西沿岸周边城市的星空夜景。当宇航员们在距离地球200多英里的高空观察地球时，宇航员鲍勃·本肯和指挥官克里斯·卡西迪也在集中精力进行最后的能源升级太空行走，他们的下一次太空行走定于7月16日星期四进行。 影像来源：NASA

In this image, NASA’s Mars 2020 Perseverance rover waits to be lifted onto its Atlas V launch vehicle at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida on July 7, 2020. The Mars 2020 mission is part of a larger program that includes missions to the Moon as a way to prepare for human exploration of the Red Planet. Charged with returning astronauts to the Moon by 2024, NASA will establish a sustained human presence on and around the Moon by 2028 through the Artemis lunar exploration plans. Image Credit: NASA/KSC 在这张照片中，2020年7月7日，美国宇航局的火星2020毅力号火星车在佛罗里达州卡纳维拉尔角空军基地等待被送入阿特拉斯5号运载火箭。 “火星2020”任务是更大计划的一部分，该计划包括为人类探索火星做准备的探月任务。负责在2024年让宇航员重返月球的NASA将通过阿耳忒弥斯(Artemis)探月计划，到2028年，他将通过阿耳忒弥斯月球探测计划在月球及其周围建立持久的人类存在。 影像来源：NASA/KSC

Astronomers using a previously captured Hubble imagery spotted a remarkable image of a young star’s unseen, planet-forming disk casting a huge shadow across a more distant cloud in a star-forming region. The star is called HBC 672, and the shadow feature was nicknamed the “Bat Shadow” because it resembles a pair of wings. The nickname turned out to be unexpectedly appropriate, because now those “wings” appear to be flapping! Image Credit: NASA, ESA, and STScI 天文学家利用之前哈勃望远镜拍摄到的照片，一颗年轻的恒星在其未被发现的形成行星的圆盘上投下了一个巨大的阴影，覆盖了恒星形成区域中较远的星云。这颗恒星被称为HBC 672，它的影子特征被称为“蝙蝠影子”，因为它像一对翅膀。原来这个绰号是出乎意料的合适，因为现在那些“翅膀”似乎在拍打! 影像来源：NASA, ESA, and STScI

Psyche, the NASA mission to explore a metal-rock asteroid of the same name, recently passed a crucial milestone that brings it closer to its August 2022 launch date. Now the mission is moving from planning and designing to high-gear manufacturing of the spacecraft hardware that will fly to its target in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Mission scientists and engineers worked together to plan the investigations that will determine what makes up the asteroid Psyche, one of the most intriguing targets in the main asteroid belt. Scientists think that, unlike most other asteroids that are rocky or icy bodies, Psyche is largely metallic iron and nickel – similar to Earth’s core – and could be the heart of an early planet that…

Technicians at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida recently finished meticulously applying more than 180 blocks of ablative material to the heat shield for the Orion spacecraft set to carry astronauts around the Moon on Artemis II. The heat shield is one of the most critical elements of Orion and protects the capsule and the astronauts inside from the nearly 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit temperatures, about half as hot at the Sun, experienced during reentry through Earth’s atmosphere when coming home from lunar velocities. Prior to installation, several large blocks of the ablative material called AVCOAT were produced at the agency’s Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans. They were then shipped to Kennedy and machined into 186 unique smaller blocks before being applied by the technicians…

A multitude of magnificent, swirling clouds in Jupiter’s dynamic North North Temperate Belt is captured in this image from NASA’s Juno spacecraft. Appearing in the scene are several bright-white “pop-up” clouds as well as an anticyclonic storm, known as a white oval. This color-enhanced image was taken at 4:58 p.m. EDT on Oct. 29, 2018 as the spacecraft performed its 16th close flyby of Jupiter. At the time, Juno was about 4,400 miles from the planet’s cloud tops, at a latitude of approximately 40 degrees north. Citizen scientists Gerald Eichstädt and Seán Doran created this image using data from the spacecraft’s JunoCam imager. JunoCam’s raw images are available at www.missionjuno.swri.edu/junocam for the public to peruse and process into image products. Image Credit: Enhanced Image by…

NASA astronaut Robert Behnken works during the Wednesday, July 1, 2020, six-hour and one-minute spacewalk to swap an aging nickel-hydrogen battery for a new lithium-ion battery on the International Space Station’s Starboard-6 truss structure. NASA astronauts Chris Cassidy and Behnken concluded their spacewalk at 12:14 p.m. EDT. During the spacewalk, the two NASA astronauts completed half the work to upgrade the batteries that provide power for one channel on one pair of the station’s solar arrays. The new batteries provide an improved and more efficient power capacity for operations. They successfully moved and connected one new, powerful lithium-ion battery and its adapter place to complete the circuit to the new battery and relocated one aging nickel-hydrogen battery to an external platform for future disposal. The…