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ALT The GALCIT rocketeers taking a break from setting up their experimental rocket motor in Pasadena's Arroyo Seco. Left to right: Rudolph Schott, Apollo M. O. Smith, Frank Malina, Edward Forman, Jack Parsons. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
ALT Mary Kathleen McGuirk, an employee at NASA Lewis Research Center (now known as NASA Glenn) wears a pointed hat and rides a space age broom for the center’s Halloween celebration in 1977.
ALT The International Space Station as it appeared on April 17, 2010, when photographed by an STS-131 crew member after space shuttle Discovery undocked from the station. The space station is backdropped by the Earth which shines in a deep blue and is covered in elongate clouds.
ALT In a photo from the 1970s, engineers gather around one of the Voyager spacecraft before it was launched.
ALT Image description: A quote by Captain Jean-Luc Picard, played by Patrick Stewart. "I've come to believe that the stars have always been in my favor." - Jean-Luc Picard. The image shows a dense cluster of bright stars, each with six large and two small diffraction spikes, due to the telescope’s optics. They have a variety of sizes depending on their brightness and distance from us in the cluster, and different colors reflecting different types of star. Patches of billowing red gas can be seen in and around the cluster, lit up by the stars. Small stars in the cluster blend into a background of distant stars and galaxies on black.
ALT This montage of 11 images taken by the Galileo spacecraft as it flew by the asteroid Gaspra on October 29, 1991, shows Gaspra growing progressively larger in the field of view of Galileo's solid-state imaging camera as the spacecraft approached the asteroid. Sunlight is coming from the right. Credit: NASA/JPL
ALT View of the Enterprise orbiter as it glides through the sky over the California desert on ALT free flight 5.
ALT King Charles shakes hands with astronaut L. Gordon Fullerton after the 5th free flight of Enterprise in October 1977. Fred Haise is in the foreground with his back to the camera. Behind Charles is Dryden Center Director David R. Scott, and on the right in the background is astronaut John Young. Credit: NASA
ALT A grainy black and white photo of a small portion of Earth seen with the blackness of space, taken on October 24, 1946. White clouds are visible over the gray of the Earth's surface.
ALT Sand dunes shaped like blue-black flames lie next to a central hill within an unnamed, 120-kilometer (75-mile) crater in eastern Arabia Terra. False colors depict the nature of the ground surface: Areas in bluish tints have more fine sand at the surface, while redder tints indicate harder sediments and outcrops of rock. Credit: NASA/JPL/Arizona State University
ALT Western Arabia Terra: This false-color image was made by combining photos taken at infrared wavelengths during local daytime and late at night. The camera was THEMIS, the Thermal Emission Imaging System, aboard NASA's Mars Odyssey orbiter. Broadly speaking, the colors indicate surface materials, with redder colors showing where rocks and hardened sediments are commonest. Tints of greens and blues map the places where finer-grain materials like sand, silt, and dust cover the surface. Credit: NASA/JPL/Arizona State University
ALT Rabe Crater lies among hundreds of thousands of other impact craters in the rough-hewn southern highlands of Mars. Spanning 108 kilometers (67 miles), Rabe is halfway between the martian equator and the south pole, and west of the giant impact basin Hellas. Two features help set Rabe Crater (and several more in its vicinity) apart from most other craters on Mars. Rabe has a flat floor with a pit sunk into it, plus a large field of dunes. A pair of visible-wavelength images together with numerous infrared ones created this false-color THEMIS view that captures portions of both the pit and the dune field. The colors portray the overnight surface temperatures: bluer colors indicate cold places, redder tints warm ones. Credit: NASA/JPL/Arizona State University
ALT The highlands of Terra Sirenum. The infrared imaging gives scientists clues about the nature of the surface. THEMIS photographs patches of ground twice per Martian day—once in late afternoon and then again just before night ends—two times when contrasts in surface temperature are strongest. In this false-color mosaic, THEMIS researchers have colored in blues and greens the areas that are cold at night, while nighttime-warm regions appear in reds, oranges, and yellows. The tints distinguish areas covered in dust and sand (cool colors) from exposures of bare rocks and deposits free of fine-grain material (warm colors). Credit: NASA/JPL/Arizona State University
ALT A Saturn V stage is lifted onto the A-2 Test Stand at NASA Stennis (1965).
ALT In this scene at sunset in January 2020, crews at Stennis Space Center lift and install the first core stage of NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) rocket onto the B-2 Test Stand.
ALT Official astronaut portrait of Ronald E. McNair taken in 1978. A model of a space shuttle appears behind his shoulder.
ALT A heavy beard covers the face of astronaut Walter M. Schirra Jr., Apollo 7 commander, as he looks out the rendezvous window in front of the commander's station on the ninth day of the Apollo 7 mission. (October 20, 1968)
ALT Astronaut Walter Cunningham, Apollo 7 lunar module pilot, wears sunglasses in the brightly lit Apollo Command Module as he writes with a space pen on the ninth day of the Apollo 7 mission. (October 20, 1968)
ALT Astronaut Donn F. Eisele, Apollo 7 command module pilot, smiles through a heavy growth of beard as he is photographed during a momentary pause on the ninth day of the Apollo 7 mission. (October 20, 1968)