Visible beneath the righthand limb of the Milky Way's starry arc are the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds, two satellite galaxies of the Milky Way. Stars show up in brilliant blue light, while organic molecules are visible as reddish hues. Above the Milky Way and to the left are two nebulas that appear to form a question mark in the sky: an arc known as Barnard's Loop and the nearly-circular Angelfish Nebula right below it. AEHF-6 will be the first national security mission for the Space Force, and this Atlas V will be the first rocket to launch bearing the Space Force's new logo. — Hanneke Weitering, Monday, June 1, 2020: A false-color, infrared exposure shows SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket and first Crew Dragon spacecraft with astronauts on board lifting off from NASA's historic Launch Complex 39A at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. — Tariq Malik. This critical test took place in early March, right before NASA's centers shut down due to the coronavirus pandemic. — Hanneke Weitering, Wednesday, January 16, 2019: Behold: the sharpest view of the Triangulum Galaxy ever! Protruding from the cusp of the heart is the Fishhead Nebula. The two men launched into space with NASA astronaut Christina Koch to join the Expedition 59 crew on the International Space Station. Officially titled the "QubeSat for Aerothermodynamic Research and Measurements on Ablation," Qarman was ejected from the space station's Nanoracks cubesat dispenser on Feb. 19. — Hanneke Weitering, Monday, March 23, 2020: NASA's Mars rover Curiosity snapped this selfie after drilling a hole at a rock feature called "Hutton" and making its way up to the Greenheugh Pediment, the rocky mound seen here behind the rover and to the left. — Hanneke Weitering, Tuesday, March 12, 2019: A telescope with an open dome looks like Pac-Man preparing to gobble down the full moon in this photo from the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope array. Scheduled to open in 2025, ELT will be "the world’s biggest eye on the sky," with a 39-meter (128-foot) primary mirror. The storm made landfall today near Sagar Island in West Bengal, India, near the border with Bangladesh.
Here's a satellite view of the sun rising over North America this morning on the first day of spring.

he said. It was the cooling water used in this under-suit that experts suspect began to leak into Parmitano's helmet. Barely visible on top of a mountain peak in the background is ESO's Very Large Telescope array. The spacewalking duo is at it again today; they set out this morning at 7:02 a.m. EST (1200 GMT) for the second spacewalk, which is expected to last about 6.5 hours. — Hanneke Weitering, Wednesday, June 19, 2019: Outside the International Space Station, the  Japanese Small Satellite Orbital Deployer ejects three small cubesats into low Earth orbit for the BIRDS-3 mission, which is part of a program to help countries build their first satellites. NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley safely arrived at the International  Space Station Sunday morning. — Hanneke Weitering, Tuesday, March 31, 2020: While most spiral galaxies have clearly defined arms the twist around a galactic core, others have patchy spiral arms that are not clearly distinguishable and resemble cotton wool. On board the Soyuz MS-12 spacecraft were NASA astronaut Nick Hague, Russian cosmonaut Alexey Ovchinin and first-time astronaut Hazzaa Ali Almansoori of the United Arab Emirates. The nebula, located about three million light-years away from Earth in the Triangulum Galaxy, is made up of ionised hydrogen. While its shape may be difficult to discern at first glance, UGC 685 is an unbarred spiral galaxy. The nebula's gases, forming the shape of a cosmic butterfly, stretch out to a maximum of two light-years from its center. could not complete its orbit insertion burn, arrived at the orbiting laboratory on Monday, Read our full story here for a wrap up of the spacewalk, check out the entire "slice" of Mars here, Here's a photo tour of Russia's space centers, amazing photos from the Expedition 59 crew here, the beginning of a planned 12,000-satellite Starlink constellation. — Hanneke Weitering, Friday, October 25, 2019: NASA's Curiosity rover, which has been exploring Mars for the last 7 years, took a new selfie on the Red Planet this month.

(2,268 kilograms) of crew supplies and science experiments were packed inside the Dragon, which is scheduled to arrive at the space station on Saturday. — Hanneke Weitering, Monday, February 3, 2020: The two brightest planets in the night sky, Venus and Jupiter, meet up for a conjunction in front of the Milky Way's shimmering core in this view from the La Silla Observatory in Chile. Scientists at ESA's ESTEC technology center in the Netherlands loaned the space rock from the Natural History Museum in Bern, Switzerland, to calibrate the instrument before it goes to the Red Planet. That galactic neighbor is a  dwarf galaxy known as the Large Magellanic Cloud, and directly beneath it is the 7-foot (2.2 meters) MPG-ESO telescope, which scans the cosmos for high-energy gamma ray bursts, or the most powerful explosions in the universe. — Hanneke Weitering, Wednesday, August 14, 2019: Two meteors dart across the night sky near the Andromeda galaxy, the Milky Way's closest galactic neighbor, in this starry image captured by astrophotographer Omid Qadrdan during the peak of the Perseid meteor shower. 'The board's responsibility is to make observations and recommendations that can be applied to improve the safety of all of NASA's human spaceflight activities.'. Conrad, the mission's commander, and Bean as lunar module pilot landed their Intrepid lander within a short moonwalk of NASA's Surveyor 3 spacecraft. — Hanneke Weitering, Wednesday, February 20, 2019: This long, brown smear spotted in Jupiter's cloud tops has earned the unofficial nickname "Mr. Hankey" due to its striking resemblance to a character from "South Park." — Hanneke Weitering, Tuesday, February 4, 2020: A Northrop Grumman Cygnus cargo spacecraft drifts away from the International Space Station after ground controllers used the station's Canadarm2 robotic arm to send it off on Friday (Jan. 31). While most barred spiral galaxies have a distinct bar of stars at their centers, the bar inside NGC 1022 is a bit more difficult to make out. European Space Agency astronaut Luca Parmitano used special tools to remove 13 screws and 10 fasteners to release the debris shield, after which NASA astronaut Drew Morgan jettisoned the shield, tossing it toward Earth to burn up in the atmosphere. — Hanneke Weitering, Monday, March 18, 2019: In this Hubble Space Telescope view of the globular cluster Messier 28, countless multicolored stars stand out as specks in a glittering cosmic sea. — Hanneke Weitering, Tuesday, September 10, 2019: This shimmering swarm of stars, captured by the Hubble Space Telescope, is an irregular dwarf galaxy named UGC 685. NASA astronauts Jessica Meir and Drew Morgan and their Russian crewmember Oleg Skripochka of Roscosmos safely touched down today at 1:16:43 a.m. EDT (0516 GMT or 11:16 a.m. local Kazakh time), southeast of the town of Dzhezkazgan. NGC 772 is classified as a peculiar, unbarred spiral galaxy, which means that it is "somewhat odd in size, shape or composition," according to NASA. The crater's dark walls appear ridged and rippled, while dark brown and black dunes are smeared across the crater floor. ", In the foreground of the image, two Russian spacecraft are docked to the orbiting lab: the Soyuz MS-12 crew spacecraft and the Progress 72 cargo vessel. — Hanneke Weitering, Tuesday, September 24, 2019: The arms of a mobile gantry close around the Soyuz rocket that will launch three Expedition 61 crewmembers to the International Space Station, shortly after the rocket was erected on the pad at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. The huge spectrometer - 16 feet by 13 feet by ten feet, with a mass of seven tons - was designed to operate for three years. To its left is a bright emission nebula named NGC 2024, or the Flame Nebula. — Hanneke Weitering, Wednesday, March 20, 2019: Happy vernal equinox! — Hanneke Weitering, Tuesday, April 16, 2019: The Antares rocket that will launch the next cargo shipment to the International Space Station stands tall on Pad-0A at NASA's Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia during sunrise this morning. The 58-foot-long (18 meters) robot is used to capture and release visiting spacecraft, and astronauts sometimes use it during spacewalks to get to hard-to-reach places outside the orbiting laboratory. — Passant Rabie, Tuesday, August 27, 2019: As devastating fires continue to sweep through the Amazon rainforest in Brazil, astronaut Luca Parmitano captured a grim view of the smoke from the International Space Station.