Space Pictures This Week: Shuttle Swap, Hubble's Jewels

Shuttle Swap

Photograph by Roberto Gonzalez, Getty Images

Workers pass the space shuttle Endeavour on August 11 as it sits in the Vehicle Assembly Building at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

Endeavour recently moved out of the Orbiter Processing Facility at Kennedy to make room for Discovery, which was moved into the OPF so technicians could prepare the retired craft for museum display.

Endeavour will next head to the California Science Center in Los Angeles, while Discovery will move to the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum's Udvar-Hazy Center in Virginia. (Also see "The Most Unforgettable Space Shuttle Pictures.")

Published August 18, 2011

European Night Lights

Diagram courtesy NOAA

A recently released satellite picture from NOAA illustrates the changes in nighttime lights in Europe between 1992 and 2009. Yellow regions show where lights have increased, purple places indicate where lights have decreased, and white areas show no change.

The picture highlights dramatic changes in Eastern Europe, most likely tied to the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1992, as more people moved west and urbanization of the former Soviet states declined.

Published August 18, 2011

Greeting Crete

Photograph courtesy NASA

Light reflecting off the sea creates a silver halo around western Crete in a picture taken July 22 by an astronaut aboard the Internation Space Station.

Crete is the largest and most heavily populated Greek island, stretching 161 miles (260 kilometers) from east to west. From 2700 to 1420 B.C. the island was the cultural center of the Minoan civilization and is said to have been the home of the legendary Minotaur.

Published August 18, 2011

Spacey Jewelry

Image courtesy ESA/NASA

Dense, bright knots of gas shine like jewels in a recently released Hubble Space Telescope picture of the Necklace nebula, a planetary nebula about 15,000 light-years away. Discovered in 2005, the cosmic adornment is actually a cloud of gas and dust created by the death of a sunlike star.

About 10,000 years ago the dying star swelled into a red giant and enveloped a close stellar companion. This caused the dead star's core and the companion star—seen together above as a central dot—to whirl around each other so fast that they now complete an orbit in less than a day.

Due to centrifugal force, most of the gas from the swollen star escaped along the star's equator, producing the unusual ring.

Published August 18, 2011

Siberian Thaw

Image courtesy Landsat-5/NASA

Like veins of jade running through cave walls, the green-tinged waters of Omulyakhskaya and Khromskaya Bays (see map) cut into the northern Siberian coast in a NASA satellite picture released August 11. The land around the bays is dotted with so-called thermokarst lakes, which are created by water released as permafrost thaws.

Thawing permafrost and thermokarst lakes both release the greenhouse gases carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere, so scientists monitor such landscapes closely to tease out any implications for future climate change.

Published August 18, 2011

Mercury's Depths

Image courtesy NASA/Johns Hopkins/Carnegie Institution of Washington

A small crater at the edge of the larger Oskison crater on Mercury is cast in high relief in a picture taken by NASA's MESSENGER spacecraft and released August 15. The angle of sunlight casts deep shadows that help show the crater's terraced walls and smooth floor.

The image is part of a set being compiled by MESSENGER to create a high-resolution base map. The map will eventually cover 90 percent of the planet's surface, helping scientists better understand the battered world's topography.

Published August 18, 2011

Dismal Fire

Image courtesy MODIS/NASA

Smoke cascades southward over the Outer Banks of North Carolina in a picture of southern Virginia's Lateral West wildfire taken by a NASA satellite on August 10. Lightning started the fire on August 4 in the dry grass and pine brush of the Great Dismal Swamp National Wildlife Refuge.

As of August 9 the fire had burned through 3,200 acres (1,295 hectares), and fire managers say it will take at least 6 inches (15 centimeters) of rainfall in a short period to put out the blaze naturally.

Published August 18, 2011