保护地球，探索宇宙，发现文明
This colorful zinnia, shown in an image from Jan. 22, 2016, grew aboard the International Space Station as part of the VEG-01 experiment. This investigation assessed the on-orbit function and performance of the Veggie facility, focusing on the growth and development of seedlings in the spaceflight environment and the composition of microbial flora on the pla...
U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón reads her poem for the Europa Clipper mission during an event with NASA, Thursday, June 1, 2023, at the Library of Congress in Washington. The original poem, entitled “In Praise of Mystery: A Poem for Europa,” connects two water worlds – Earth and Europa. The poem will be engraved on a plaque carried aboard the Europa Clipper spa...
The VIPER (Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover) engineering test team uses lunar soil simulants and hand-picked rocks to carefully shape the terrain to realistically mimic actual features at the surface of the Moon’s South Pole at in the SLOPE Lab – short for Simulated Lunar Operations Laboratory at NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Cle...
Hired by NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston in 1963, Josephine Jue was a Chinese-American computer programmer and mathematician who worked for the agency for more than 30 years. Of her notable contributions, in the mid-1970s she oversaw development of the HAL/S compiler for the Space Shuttle. See more of the brilliant Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and...
A Rocket Lab Electron rocket stands on Pad B, Launch Complex 1, in Māhia, New Zealand, just ahead of a successful launch on Friday, May 26, with NASA’s Time-Resolved Observations of Precipitation structure and storm Intensity with a Constellation of Smallsats (TROPICS) CubeSats payload. Now that the final pair of CubeSats are in orbit, TROPICS will study the...
“It’s important for me to be an advocate for Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility broadly for minorities and Asian Americans because I think I have a level of privilege that maybe other minorities may not feel that they do. I’m Asian American, Indian family, you know, privileged, not just in income and position, but also, we have...
Two black-bellied whistling ducks walk through a field of wildflowers at Kennedy Space Center in Florida on May 19, 2023. The center shares a border with the Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge. Merritt Island’s strategic location along the Atlantic Flyway provides a resting and feeding place for thousands of wading birds, shorebirds, and songbirds...
The SpaceX Dragon crew spacecraft, named Freedom, is seen as it approaches the International Space Station with four Axiom Mission 2 private astronauts aboard on Monday, May 22, 2023. 11 crew members are living aboard the International Space Station with four spaceships now docked to the orbiting lab. Two SpaceX Dragon crew ships are docked adjacent to each ...
Scores of baby stars shrouded by dust are revealed in this infrared image of the star-forming region NGC 2174, as seen by NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope. Some of the clouds in the region resemble the face of a monkey in visible-light images, hence the nebula’s nickname: the “Monkey Head.” However, in infrared images such as this, the monkey...
The densely packed globular cluster NGC 6325 glistens in this image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. This concentrated group of stars lies around 26,000 light-years from Earth in the constellation Ophiuchus. Globular clusters like NGC 6325 are tightly bound collections of stars with anywhere from tens of thousands to millions of members. They can be...