A supermoon rises behind the Washington Monument, Sunday, June 23, 2013, in Washington. This year the supermoon is up to 13.5% larger and 30% brighter than a typical full moon is. This is a result of the moon reaching its perigree – the closest that it gets to the Earth during the course of its orbit. During perigree on June 23, the moon was about 221,824 miles away, as compared to the 252,581 miles away that it is at its furthest distance from the Earth (apogee).
Image Credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls via NASA http://ift.tt/11Iuu8m

The Soyuz rocket is rolled out to the launch pad by train on Monday, Sept. 23, 2013, at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. Launch of the Soyuz rocket is scheduled for Sept. 26 and will send Expedition 37 Soyuz Commander Oleg Kotov, NASA Flight Engineer Michael Hopkins and Russian Flight Engineer Sergei Ryazansky on a five-and-a-half month mission aboard the International Space Station.
Image Credit: NASA/Carla Cioffi via NASA http://ift.tt/16TT8s7

Just as Saturn’s famous hexagonal shaped jet stream encircles the planet’s north pole, the rings encircle the planet, as seen from Cassini’s position high above. Around and around everything goes!
This view looks toward the sunlit side of the rings from about 43 degrees above the ringplane. The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera on Nov. 23, 2013 using a spectral filter that preferentially admits wavelengths of near-infrared light centered at 752 nanometers.
The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 1.6 million miles (2.5 million kilometers) from Saturn and at a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 97 degrees. Image scale is 93 miles (150 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, Washington, D.C. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging operations center is based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.
For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission, visit: http://ift.tt/Jcddhk and http://ift.tt/ZjpQgB.
Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute via NASA http://ift.tt/1fBgt5T

Space Launch Complex 40 on Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida is illuminated by a Falcon 9 rocket as it lifts off at 8:35 p.m. EDT carrying a Dragon capsule to orbit. Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX, built both the rocket and capsule for NASA’s first Commercial Resupply Services, or CRS-1, mission to the International Space Station.

SpaceX CRS-1 is an important step toward making America’s microgravity research program self-sufficient by providing a way to deliver and return significant amounts of cargo, including science experiments, to and from the orbiting laboratory. NASA has contracted for 12 commercial resupply flights from SpaceX and eight from the Orbital Sciences Corp.

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On May 23, 2014, Expedition 40 Commander Steve Swanson posted this photograph — taken from the International Space Station — to Instagram. Swanson noted, “Western Sahara – the contrast between the sand and the water is spectacular from here.” Swanson uploaded the first image from space to Instagram on April 7. He began posting imagery to the social media site during his pre-flight training.
› View Instagram imagery from the International Space Station
The three Expedition 40 crew members aboard the International Space Station worked advanced science this week while awaiting a new trio, set to lift off on Wednesday, May 28. Soyuz Commander and cosmonaut Maxim Suraev, NASA astronaut Reid Wiseman and European astronaut Alexander Gerst will launch aboard the Soyuz TMA-13M spacecraft at 3:57 p.m. EDT (1:57 a.m. May 29 Baikonur time) from the Baikonur Cosmodrome.
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Saturn’s north polar hexagon basks in the Sun’s light now that spring has come to the northern hemisphere. Many smaller storms dot the north polar region and Saturn’s signature rings, which appear to disappear on account of Saturn’s shadow, put in an appearance in the background.

The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft’s wide-angle camera on Nov. 27, 2012 using a spectral filter sensitive to wavelengths of near-infrared light centered at 750 nanometers.

The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 403,000 miles (649,000 kilometers) from Saturn and at a Sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 21 degrees. Image scale is 22 miles (35 kilometers) per pixel.

Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute via NASA http://ift.tt/X9Ghw3

Technicians and engineers at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California mate the Pegasus XL rocket with the Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph, or IRIS, solar observatory to the Orbital Sciences L-1011 carrier aircraft.

The launch of NASA’s IRIS mission has been delayed one day to 10:27 p.m. EDT on Thursday, June 27. Live NASA Television launch coverage begins at 9 p.m.

IRIS will open a new window of discovery by tracing the flow of energy and plasma through the chromospheres and transition region into the sun’s corona using spectrometry and imaging. The IRIS mission will observe how solar material moves, gathers energy and heats up as it travels through a largely unexplored region of the solar atmosphere. The interface region, located between the sun’s visible surface and upper atmosphere, is where most of the sun’s ultraviolet emission is generated. These emissions impact the near-Earth space environment and Earth’s climate.

Image Credit: NASA/Randy Beaudoin via NASA http://ift.tt/1aefUxg

Jets generated by supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies can transport huge amounts of energy across great distances. 3C353 is a wide, double-lobed source where the galaxy is the tiny point in the center and giant plumes of radiation can be seen in X-rays from Chandra (purple) and radio data from the Very Large Array (orange).
Image Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/Tokyo Institute of Technology/J.Kataoka et al, Radio: NRAO/VLA
 
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› Chandra on Flickr via NASA http://ift.tt/17wXt7A

A Japanese H-IIA rocket carrying the NASA-Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) Global Precipitation Measurement (GPM) Core Observatory rolls out to launch pad 1 at the Tanegashima Space Center, Thursday, Feb. 27, 2014, Tanegashima, Japan. Once launched, the GPM spacecraft will collect information that unifies data from an international network of existing and future satellites to map global rainfall and snowfall every three hours.
The rocket is scheduled to lift off during a launch window that opens at 1:37 p.m. EST on Thursday, Feb. 27 (3:37 a.m., Friday, Feb. 28 Japan time).
GPM is an international satellite mission to provide next-generation observations of rain and snow worldwide every three hours. The GPM Core Observatory satellite carries advanced instruments that will set a new standard for precipitation measurements from space. The data they provide will be used to unify precipitation measurements made by an international network of partner satellites to quantify when, where, and how much it rains or snows around the world.
The GPM mission will help advance our understanding of Earth’s water and energy cycles, improve the forecasting of extreme events that cause natural disasters, and extend current capabilities of using satellite precipitation information to directly benefit society.
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Image Credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls via NASA http://ift.tt/1dEhKW3

The American flag patch pictured here is from the left arm on Neil Armstrong’s Apollo 11 suit. This image was taken in April 2006 at the National Air and Space Museum’s Garber Facility in Suitland, Md.

NASA astronauts Leroy Chiao, Edward Michael Fincke and Greg Chamitoff have all voted while aboard the International Space Station thanks to a bill passed in 1997 by Texas legislatures. The bill sets up a technical procedure for astronauts – nearly all of whom live in Houston – to vote from space.

Current station Commander Suni Williams, a Florida resident, voted via absentee ballot before departing for her duties as part of Expedition 32 on the International Space Station.

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