Space Photos This Week: Hayabusa Fireball, Whirlpools

Hayabusa's Fiery Return

Image courtesy NASA's DC-8 Airborne Laboratory

Like a sparkling firework, much of the Japanese space probe Hayabusa disintegrates as it reenters Earth's atmosphere on June 13.

Hidden in the shower of sparks, a heat-shielded 16-inch (40-centimeter) capsule may contain precious scrapings from an asteroid, which could help us understand how our planet and solar system formed.

If Hayabusa has succeeded in harvesting asteroid dust—results are pending—the craft would be among the few to return rock samples from space. Other such missions include the Apollo program, which retrieved moon rocks in the late 1960s and early '70s, and the comet-dust harvester Stardust, which crashed into the Utah desert at 28,900 miles (46,400 kilometers) an hour in 2006.

(Read more about Hayabusa's return, and watch a video of the fireball streaking across the sky.)

Published June 16, 2010

Cosmic Boomerang

Image courtesy NASA/ESA

The Hubble Space Telescope surveys the universe even in its spare time, when the telescope's not being used for scheduled research. During one such "snapshot" session, Hubble recorded the little-known nebula IRAS 05437 2505, with its strange, boomerang-shaped arc (shown in a picture released June 14).

First noticed in 1983, this faint gas cloud remains a mystery in many ways. Hubble scientist say the cloud's bright boomerang could be the result of a young star shooting through a dust cloud at 125,000 miles (200,000 kilometers) an hour—or not.

(See some choice pictures from Hubble, or its top discoveries.)

Published June 16, 2010

Our Blue Dot, Dissected

Photograph courtesy NASA Earth Observatory

If you'd been an astronaut on the International Space Station last month, you might have often looked out the window and seen this: Earth's atmosphere, laid out as plain as day, like rainbow-colored layers of an onion.

From the top: First, there are the deep blues of the upper atmosphere, which is responsible for the blueness of our sky, as seen from the ground. Next is a lemon yellow slice of stratosphere, 30 miles (50 kilometers) above Earth's surface, which would be an arid place in person—few clouds are found at such heights.

Glowing pumpkin orange in this May 25 picture, which was released June 14, the troposphere holds nearly all of the water vapor above Earth. Variations in its color, such as the dark streaks at right, are caused by clouds or airborne particles. Wafting 4 to 12 miles (6 to 20 kilometers) above Earth's surface, the troposphere also holds 80 percent of the mass of our planet's atmosphere.

And somewhere, deep beneath it all, is the Indian Ocean.

(Learn more about Earth's atmosphere.)

Published June 16, 2010

Stirred Wind

Image courtesy ESA

So-called von Kármán vortices are seen south of the Canary Islands (map), off the northwestern coast of Africa.

The vortices, a particularly strange-looking form of cloud, are made when air flows around an obstruction—in this case, the Canaries. (More strange cloud pictures.)

(See pictures of a new telescope in the Canary Islands.)

Published June 16, 2010