Space Pictures This Week: Cosmic Pinwheel, Mountain Meteor

Snowy Liftoff

Photograph courtesy Thilo Kranz, DLR

The snow-dusted forests of northern Sweden serve as the backdrop to a rocket launch on November 27.

The European Space Agency and the DLR German Space Center fired the Texus rocket on a 13-minute flight to test a new way of handling supercold liquid hydrogen and oxygen propellants in low gravity.

(Related pictures: "NASA's New Rocket-And 4 'Lost Launchers.'")

Published December 2, 2011

Southern Pinwheel

Image courtesy Caltech/NASA

A recently released picture from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope shows the spiral structure of the galaxy M83, also known as the Southern Pinwheel. Astronomers think this galaxy is a smaller version of what our own Milky Way might look like if we could see it from the outside.

In a view reminiscent of a holiday wreath, the infrared picture reveals the galaxy's dusty spiral arms in green dotted with reddish white regions of intense star formation.

Published December 2, 2011

Mars Erosion

Image courtesy U. Arizona/NASA

A recently released high-resolution picture shows the edge of eroded deposits in the Electris region of Mars.

Snapped by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, the picture is intended to help scientists figure out what geologic process might have formed the deposit and how it has changed over time.

(Find out about a new NASA rover now on its way to Mars.)

Published December 2, 2011

Mountain Meteor

Photograph by Amir Abolfath, TWAN

An Orionid meteor streaks over Alamut Castle in Iran in a recently released picture taken in October. The meteor is seen within its namesake constellation, Orion.

The mountain fortress of Alamut was built into the Alborz Mountains in the ninth century. Over the years the castle has been home to religious groups, feudal lords, and scholars, including the 13th-century Persian astronomer Nasir al-Din al-Tusi.

(See more Orionids pictures.)

Published December 2, 2011

Star-Making Swan

Image courtesy NASA/IPAC/MSX

Bright swaths amid dense dust show where stars are forming in this infrared view of Cygnus X, a stellar "factory" believed to contain enough raw material to make two million stars like our sun.

Sitting 4,500 light-years away in the constellation Cygnus, the Swan, the star-forming region was first spotted by astronomers in the 1950s as a bright radio source.

Recently, scientists using NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope also detected intense gamma-ray emission within Cygnus X—possibly a sign that the region's cavities of gas and dust, carved by star birth, have managed to corral some of the mysterious particles known as cosmic rays.

(Also see "Black Holes Belch Universe's Most Energetic Particles.")

Published December 2, 2011

Mexico Dust

Image courtesy MODIS/NASA

Dust plumes blow off mainland Mexico and the Baja Peninsula in picture of the region taken in late November by NASA's Aqua satellite.

The source of the dust storm on the mainland isn't clear in the satellite image, but the picture does show a sandy desert region as the source of the peninsula's plume.

Published December 2, 2011