Tuesday 5 April 2011

Four iconic images from NASA - Endeavour, Discovery, Mars and Mercury!

Wow! This is Endeavour attached to its external fuel tanks ready and in position for its final space flight penned in for April 19th from the Kennedy Space Centre, Florida. It looks majestic in its floodlights.
Credit: Jim Grossman

Discovery comes safely home with it's crew after its 13 day mission to the International Space Station.
This was Discovery's 39th and final mission. It just looks like a normal plane doesn't it - amazing to think how far it's been and how well it's served us. 
Credit: Jack Pfaller

This is Chasma Boreale a long, flat-floored valley which cuts deep into Mars' north polar icecap. Its walls rise about 1400m above the floor. Where the edge of the ice cap has retreated, sheets of sand are emerging that accumulated during earlier ice-free climatic cycles. Winds blowing off the ice have pushed loose sand into dunes and driven them down-canyon in a westward direction. Such an incredible image constructed by NASA from their Thermal Emission Imaging System instrument on Mars Odyssey between 2002 and 2005.
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU

First ever obtained image from Mercury, the innermost planet during an orbit on March 29th 2011! Over the subsequent six hours, MESSENGER acquired an additional 363 images before downlinking some of the data to Earth. some of which is still continuing to come down...
Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington

To see all 31 images from March click here and enjoy!


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