Portal:Outer space
Portal maintenance status: (April 2019)
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Introduction
Outer space (or simply space) is the expanse that exists beyond Earth's atmosphere and between celestial bodies. It contains ultra-low levels of particle densities, constituting a near-perfect vacuum of predominantly hydrogen and helium plasma, permeated by electromagnetic radiation, cosmic rays, neutrinos, magnetic fields and dust. The baseline temperature of outer space, as set by the background radiation from the Big Bang, is 2.7 kelvins (−270 °C; −455 °F).
The plasma between galaxies is thought to account for about half of the baryonic (ordinary) matter in the universe, having a number density of less than one hydrogen atom per cubic metre and a kinetic temperature of millions of kelvins. Local concentrations of matter have condensed into stars and galaxies. Intergalactic space takes up most of the volume of the universe, but even galaxies and star systems consist almost entirely of empty space. Most of the remaining mass-energy in the observable universe is made up of an unknown form, dubbed dark matter and dark energy.
Outer space does not begin at a definite altitude above Earth's surface. The Kármán line, an altitude of 100 km (62 mi) above sea level, is conventionally used as the start of outer space in space treaties and for aerospace records keeping. Certain portions of the upper stratosphere and the mesosphere are sometimes referred to as "near space". The framework for international space law was established by the Outer Space Treaty, which entered into force on 10 October 1967. This treaty precludes any claims of national sovereignty and permits all states to freely explore outer space. Despite the drafting of UN resolutions for the peaceful uses of outer space, anti-satellite weapons have been tested in Earth orbit.
The concept that the space between the Earth and the Moon must be a vacuum was first proposed in the 17th century after scientists discovered that air pressure decreased with altitude. The immense scale of outer space was grasped in the 20th century when the distance to the Andromeda galaxy was first measured. Humans began the physical exploration of space later in the same century with the advent of high-altitude balloon flights. This was followed by crewed rocket flights and, then, crewed Earth orbit, first achieved by Yuri Gagarin of the Soviet Union in 1961. The economic cost of putting objects, including humans, into space is very high, limiting human spaceflight to low Earth orbit and the Moon. On the other hand, uncrewed spacecraft have reached all of the known planets in the Solar System. Outer space represents a challenging environment for human exploration because of the hazards of vacuum and radiation. Microgravity has a negative effect on human physiology that causes both muscle atrophy and bone loss. (Full article...)
Selected article
The Hubble Deep Field is the result of a series of observations by the Hubble Space Telescope of a small region of the northern celestial hemisphere. It was assembled from 342 separate exposures taken with the Space Telescope's Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 over 10 consecutive days between December 18 and December 28, 1995. The field is small enough that only a few foreground stars in the Milky Way lie within it; thus, almost all of the 3,000 objects in the image are galaxies, some of which are among the youngest and most distant known. By revealing such large numbers of very young galaxies, the HDF has become a landmark image in the study of the early universe, and it has been the source of almost 800 scientific papers since it was created. Three years after the HDF observations were taken, a region in the south celestial hemisphere was imaged in a similar way and named the Hubble Deep Field South. The similarities between the two regions strengthened the belief that the universe is uniform over large scales and that the Earth occupies a typical region in the universe (the cosmological principle).
Selected picture
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Image 1Photo credit: NASAThe Eagle Nebula (also known as Messier Object 16, M16 or NGC 6611) is a young open cluster of stars. The nebula is an active region of star formation. Light from the bright, hot, young stars near the centre of the cluster illuminate the clouds of hydrogen gas and dust still collapsing to form new stars.
As projected on the sky, the Eagle Nebula lies in the constellation of Serpens Cauda. In three dimensions, it is relatively close to the Solar System being some 7,000 light years away on the edge of the Sagittarius Arm, the next nearest spiral arm towards the centre of the Milky Way.
In fact, when the picture is not coloured, is only red colored, the "Eagle" can be seen as a dark spot in the center of the nebula. -
Image 2Neptune is the eighth and farthest known planet from the Sun in the Solar System. In the Solar System, it is the fourth-largest planet by diameter, the third-most-massive planet and the densest giant planet. Neptune is 17 times the mass of Earth, slightly more massive than its near-twin Uranus. Neptune is denser and physically smaller than Uranus because its greater mass causes more gravitational compression of its atmosphere. Neptune orbits the Sun once every 164.8 years at an average distance of 30.1 au (4.5 billion km; 2.8 billion mi). It is named after the Roman god of the sea and has the astronomical symbol ♆, a stylised version of the god Neptune's trident.
This picture of Neptune was taken by NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft in 1989, at a range of 4.4 million miles (7.1 million kilometres) from the planet, approximately four days before closest approach. The photograph shows the Great Dark Spot, a storm about the size of Earth, in the centre, while the fast-moving bright feature nicknamed the "Scooter" and the Small Dark Spot can be seen on the western limb. These clouds were seen to persist for as long as the spacecraft's cameras could resolve them. -
Image 3The Sombrero Galaxy is a spiral galaxy in the Virgo constellation. It was discovered in the late 1700s. It is about 28 million light years away and is just faint enough to be invisible to the naked eye but easily visible with small telescopes. In our sky, it is about one-fifth the diameter of the full moon. M104 is moving away from Earth at about 1,000 kilometers per second.
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Image 4NASA astronaut Robert Curbeam (left) and European Space Agency (ESA) astronaut Christer Fuglesang participate in STS-116's first of three planned sessions of extra-vehicular activity (EVA) as construction resumes on the International Space Station. The landmasses depicted in the background are the South Island (left) and North Island (right) of New Zealand.
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Image 5Mercury is the smallest and closest to the Sun of the eight planets in the Solar System. It has no known natural satellites. The planet is named after the Roman deity Mercury, the messenger to the gods.
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Image 6The Pillars of Creation, a series of elephant trunks of interstellar gas and dust in the Eagle Nebula, are the subject of a famous Hubble Space Telescope photograph taken in 1995. They are so named because the depicted gas and dust, while being eroded by the light from nearby stars, are in the process of creating new stars. Shown here is a 2014 rephotograph, which was unveiled in 2015 as part of the telescope's 25th anniversary celebrations.
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Image 7The Pioneer plaque, which was included on both Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11 unmanned spacecraft, the first man-made objects to leave the Solar System. Made from gold-anodised aluminium, the plaque shows the figures of a man and a woman along with several symbols that are designed to provide information about the origin of the spacecraft. However, the mean time for the spacecraft to come within 30 astronomical units of a star is longer than the current age of our galaxy.
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Image 8Photo credit: Spirit roverA 360° panorama taken during the descent from the summit of Husband Hill, one of the Columbia Hills in Gusev crater, Mars. This stitched image is composed of 405 individual images taken with five different filters on the panoramic camera over the course of five Martian days.
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Image 9Photograph: NASA, ESA, A. Aloisi (STScI/ESA), and The Hubble Heritage (STScI/AURA)-ESA/Hubble CollaborationAn image of NGC 4449, highlighting its qualities as a starburst galaxy. NGC 4449, an irregular galaxy in the constellation Canes Venatici located about 12 million light years from Earth, has a rate of star formation twice that of the Milky Way's satellite galaxy, the Large Magellanic Cloud. Interactions with nearby galaxies are thought to have influenced this star formation.
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Image 10Pale Blue Dot is the name given to this 1990 photo of Earth taken from Voyager 1 when its vantage point reached the edge of the Solar System, a distance of roughly 3.7 billion miles (6 billion kilometres). Earth can be seen as a blueish-white speck approximately halfway down the brown band to the right. The light band over Earth is an artifact of sunlight scattering in the camera's lens, resulting from the small angle between Earth and the Sun. Carl Sagan came up with the idea of turning the spacecraft around to take a composite image of the Solar System. Six years later, he reflected, "All of human history has happened on that tiny pixel, which is our only home."
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Image 11Photograph: Ken CrawfordNGC 4565 (also known as the Needle Galaxy) is an edge-on spiral galaxy about 30 to 50 million light-years away in the constellation Coma Berenices. NGC 4565 is a giant spiral galaxy more luminous than the Andromeda Galaxy, and has a population of roughly 240 globular clusters, more than the Milky Way.
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Image 12A TRACE image of sunspots on the surface, or photosphere, of the sun from September 2002, is taken in the far ultraviolet on a relatively quiet day for solar activity. However, the image still shows a large sunspot group visible as a bright area near the horizon. Although sunspots are relatively cool regions on the surface of the sun, the bright glowing gas flowing around the sunspots have a temperature of over one million °C (1.8 million °F). The high temperatures are thought to be related to the rapidly changing magnetic field loops that channel solar plasma.
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Image 13Image credit: Dave JarvisAn illustration of relative astronomical orders of magnitude, starting with the terrestrial planets of the Solar System in image 1 (top left) and ending with the largest known star, VY Canis Majoris, at the bottom right. The biggest celestial body in each image is shown on the left of the next frame.
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Image 14Photo credit: New Horizons probeAn animation of an eruption by the Tvashtar Paterae volcanic region on the innermost of Jupiter's Galilean moons, Io. The ejecta plume is 330 km (205 mi) high, though only its uppermost half is visible in this image, as its source lies over the moon's limb on its far side. This animation consists of a sequence of five images taken by NASA's New Horizons probe on March 1, 2007, over the course of eight minutes from 23:50 UTC.
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Image 15A composite photo of the Orion Nebula, the closest region of star formation to Earth. It is composed of 520 separate images and NASA calls it "one of the most detailed astronomical images ever produced". The nebula is located below Orion's Belt and is visible to the naked eye at night. It is one of the most scrutinized and photographed objects in the night sky, and is among the most intensely-studied celestial features.
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Image 16Photograph credit: European Space AgencyMars is the fourth planet from the Sun and is known as the "Red Planet" due to its reddish appearance as seen from Earth. The planet is named after Mars, the Roman god of war. A terrestrial planet, Mars has a thin atmosphere and surface features reminiscent both of the impact craters of the Moon and the volcanoes, valleys, deserts and polar ice caps of the Earth. The planet has the highest mountain in the Solar System, Olympus Mons, as well as the largest canyon, Valles Marineris. Mars's rotation period and seasonal cycles are also similar to those of the Earth. Of all the planets in the Solar System other than Earth, Mars is the most likely to harbour liquid water and perhaps life. There are ongoing investigations assessing Mars's past potential for habitability, as well as the possibility of extant life. Future astrobiology missions are planned, including NASA's Mars 2020 rover and the European Space Agency (ESA)'s Rosalind Franklin rover. In November 2016, NASA reported finding a large amount of underground ice in the Utopia Planitia region of the planet. The volume of water detected has been estimated to be equivalent to the volume of water in Lake Superior. Mars has two moons, Phobos and Deimos, which are small and irregularly shaped.
This picture is a true-colour image of Mars, taken from a distance of about 240,000 kilometres (150,000 mi) by the OSIRIS instrument on ESA's Rosetta spacecraft, during its February 2007 flyby of the planet. The image was generated using OSIRIS's orange (red), green and blue filters. -
Image 17Credit: NASAThis Supernova remnant of Kepler's Supernova (SN 1604) is made up of the materials left behind by the gigantic explosion of a star. There are two possible routes to this end: either a massive star may cease to generate fusion energy in its core, and collapse inward under the force of its own gravity, or a white dwarf star may accumulate material from a companion star until it reaches a critical mass and undergoes a similar collapse. In either case, the resulting supernova explosion expels much or all of the stellar material with great force.
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Image 18Map credit: Ignace-Gaston PardiesIgnace-Gaston Pardies (1636–1673) was a French Catholic priest and scientist. His celestial atlas, entitled Globi coelestis in tabulas planas redacti descriptio, comprised six charts of the night sky and was first published in 1674. The atlas uses a gnomonic projection so that the plates make up a cube of the celestial sphere. The constellation figures are drawn from Uranometria, but were carefully reworked and adapted to a broader view of the sky. This is the second plate from a 1693 edition of Pardies's atlas, featuring constellations including Pegasus and Andromeda, visible in the northern sky.
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Image 19The asteroid 433 Eros was named after the Greek god of love Eros. This S-type asteroid is the second-largest near-Earth asteroid. This image shows the view looking from one end of the asteroid across the gouge on its underside and toward the opposite end.
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Image 20Image: Tom RuenAn animation of the phases of the Moon. As the Moon revolves around the Earth, the Sun lights the Moon from a different side, creating the different phases. In the image, the Moon appears to get bigger as well as "wobble" slightly. Tidal locking synchronizes the Moon's rotation period on its axis to match its orbital period around the earth. These two periods nearly cancel each other out, except that the Moon's orbit is elliptical. This causes its orbital motion to speed up when closer to the Earth, and slow down when farther away, causing the Moon's apparent diameter to change, as well as the wobbling motion observed.
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Image 21"The Blue Marble" is a famous photograph of Earth. NASA officially credits the image to the entire Apollo 17 crew — Eugene Cernan, Ronald Evans and Jack Schmitt — all of whom took photographic images during the mission. Apollo 17 passed over Africa during daylight hours and Antarctica is also illuminated. The photograph was taken approximately five hours after the spacecraft's launch, while en route to the Moon. Apollo 17, notably, was the last manned lunar mission; no humans since have been at a range where taking a "whole-Earth" photograph such as "The Blue Marble" would be possible.
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Image 22Image credit: United States Geological SurveyA composite image of Olympus Mons on Mars, the tallest known volcano and mountain in the Solar System. This image was created from black-and-white imagery from the USGS's Mars Global Digital Image Mosaic and color imagery acquired from the 1978 visit of Viking 1.
Space-related portals
General images
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Image 1Artist's impression of dust formation around a supernova explosion. (from Cosmic dust)
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Image 2Earth and the Moon as seen from cislunar space on the 2022 Artemis 1 mission (from Outer space)
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Image 3Perseverance's backshell sitting upright on the surface of Jezero Crater (from Space debris)
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Image 4The Long Duration Exposure Facility (LDEF) is an important source of information on small-particle space debris. (from Space debris)
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Image 5This light-year-long knot of interstellar gas and dust resembles a caterpillar. (from Interstellar medium)
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Image 6Cosmic dust of the Horsehead Nebula as revealed by the Hubble Space Telescope. (from Cosmic dust)
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Image 8A proposed timeline of the origin of space, from physical cosmology (from Outline of space science)
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Image 9Cosmic dust of the Andromeda Galaxy as revealed in infrared light by the Spitzer Space Telescope. (from Cosmic dust)
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Image 11A computer-generated animation by the European Space Agency representing space debris in low earth orbit at the current rate of growth compared to mitigation measures being taken. (from Space debris)
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Image 12After reentry, Delta 2 second stage pieces were found in South Africa. (from Space debris)
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Image 13Illustration of a satellite breaking up into multiple pieces at higher altitudes. (from Space debris)
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Image 14The diversity found in the different types and scales of astronomical objects make the field of study increasingly specialized. (from Outline of space science)
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Image 15Spent upper stage of a Delta II rocket, photographed by the XSS 10 satellite (from Space debris)
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Image 16Space debris identified as WT1190F, burning up in a fireball over Sri Lanka. (from Space debris)
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Image 17The distribution of ionized hydrogen (known by astronomers as H II from old spectroscopic terminology) in the parts of the Galactic interstellar medium visible from the Earth's northern hemisphere as observed with the Wisconsin Hα Mapper (Haffner et al. 2003) harv error: no target: CITEREFHaffnerReynoldsTufteMadsen2003 (help). (from Interstellar medium)
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Image 18Major elements of 200 stratospheric interplanetary dust particles. (from Cosmic dust)
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Image 19A wide field view of outer space as seen from Earth's surface at night. The interplanetary dust cloud is visible as the horizontal band of zodiacal light, including the false dawn (edges) and gegenschein (center), which is visually crossed by the Milky Way (from Outer space)
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Image 20For the first time, the NASA / ESA / Canadian Space Agency / James Webb Space Telescope has observed the chemical signature of carbon-rich dust grains at redshift z ≈ 7, which is roughly equivalent to one billion years after the birth of the Universe, this observation suggests exciting avenues of investigation into both the production of cosmic dust and the earliest stellar populations in our Universe. (from Cosmic dust)
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Image 21Vanguard 1 is expected to remain in orbit for 240 years. (from Space debris)
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Image 24Spatial density of space debris by altitude according to ESA MASTER-2001, without debris from the Chinese ASAT and 2009 collision events (from Space debris)
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Image 25A micrometeoroid left this crater on the surface of Space Shuttle Challenger's front window on STS-7. (from Space debris)
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Image 27Near-Earth space showing the low-Earth (blue), medium Earth (green), and high Earth (red) orbits. The last extends beyond the radius of geosynchronous orbits (from Outer space)
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Image 28Gabbard diagram of almost 300 pieces of debris from the disintegration of the five-month-old third stage of the Chinese Long March 4 booster on 11 March 2000 (from Space debris)
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Image 29A MESSENGER image from 18,000 km showing a region about 500 km across (2008) (from Space exploration)
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Image 30Infographic showing the space debris situation in different kinds of orbits around Earth (from Space debris)
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Image 31NASA computer-generated image of debris objects in Earth orbit, c. 2005. (from Space debris)
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Image 32Growth of tracked objects in orbit and related events; efforts to manage outer space global commons have so far not reduced the debris or the growth of objects in orbit (from Space debris)
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Image 33The original Magdeburg hemispheres (left) used to demonstrate Otto von Guericke's vacuum pump (right)
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Image 34Concept for a space-based solar power system to beam energy down to Earth (from Outer space)
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Image 35The International Space Station is an orbiting laboratory for space applications and habitability. Visible in the background is yellow-green airglow of Earth's ionosphere and the interstellar field of the Milky Way. (from Outer space)
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Image 36Concept art for a NASA Vision mission (from Space exploration)
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Image 37Buzz Aldrin taking a core sample of the Moon during the Apollo 11 mission (from Space exploration)
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Image 38Space Shuttle Endeavour had a major impact on its radiator during STS-118. The entry hole is about 5.5 mm (0.22 in), and the exit hole is twice as large. (from Space debris)
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Image 39Because of the hazards of a vacuum, astronauts must wear a pressurized space suit while outside their spacecraft.
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Image 40Large-scale matter distribution in a cubic section of the universe. The blue fiber-like structures represent the matter, and the empty regions in between represent the cosmic voids of the intergalactic medium (from Outer space)
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Image 42Artistic image of a rocket lifting from a Saturn moon (from Space exploration)
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Image 45Bow shock formed by the magnetosphere of the young star LL Orionis (center) as it collides with the Orion Nebula flow
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Image 46Debris impacts on Mir's solar panels degraded their performance. The damage is most noticeable on the panel on the right, which is facing the camera with a high degree of contrast. Extensive damage to the smaller panel below is due to impact with a Progress spacecraft. (from Space debris)
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Image 47Debris density in low Earth orbit (from Space debris)
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Image 48A laser-guided observation of the Milky Way Galaxy at the Paranal Observatory in Chile in 2010 (from Outline of space science)
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Image 49Voyager 1 is the first artificial object to reach the interstellar medium. (from Interstellar medium)
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Image 50A computer-generated map of objects orbiting Earth, as of 2005. About 95% are debris, not working artificial satellites (from Outer space)
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Image 51Reconstruction of solar activity over 11,400 years. Period of equally high activity over 8,000 years ago marked. (from Space climate)
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Image 52Astronomers used the James Webb Space Telescope to image the warm dust around a nearby young star, Fomalhaut, in order to study the first asteroid belt ever seen outside of the Solar System in infrared light. (from Cosmic dust)
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Image 55Objects in Earth orbit including fragmentation debris, November 2020, NASA: ODPO (from Space debris)
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Image 56Map showing the Sun located near the edge of the Local Interstellar Cloud and Alpha Centauri about 4 light-years away in the neighboring G-Cloud complex (from Interstellar medium)
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Image 57Astronaut Buzz Aldrin had a personal Communion service when he first arrived on the surface of the Moon. (from Space exploration)
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Image 58Smooth chondrite interplanetary dust particle. (from Cosmic dust)
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Image 59Illustration of Earth's atmosphere gradual transition into outer space (from Outer space)
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Image 60Conventional anti-satellite weapons such as the SM-3 missile remain legal under space law, even though they create hazardous space debris (from Outer space)
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Image 63Astronaut Piers Sellers during the third spacewalk of STS-121, a demonstration of orbiter heat shield repair techniques (from Outline of space science)
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Image 64Known orbit planes of Fengyun-1C debris one month after the weather satellite's disintegration by the Chinese ASAT (from Space debris)
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Image 65Apollo 16 LEM Orion, the Lunar Roving Vehicle and astronaut John Young (1972) (from Space exploration)
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Image 66Spatial density of LEO space debris by altitude, according to 2011 a NASA report to the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs (from Space debris)
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Image 69Model of Vostok spacecraft (from Space exploration)
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Image 70A dusty trail from the early Solar System to carbonaceous dust today. (from Cosmic dust)
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Image 72Atmospheric attenuation in dB/km as a function of frequency over the EHF band. Peaks in absorption at specific frequencies are a problem, due to atmosphere constituents such as water vapor (H2O) and carbon dioxide (CO2). (from Interstellar medium)
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Image 74Timeline of the expansion of the universe, where visible space is represented by the circular sections. At left, a dramatic expansion occurs in the inflationary epoch, and at the center, the expansion accelerates. Neither time nor size are to scale. (from Outer space)
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Image 76View of an orbital debris hole made in the panel of the Solar Max satellite. (from Space debris)
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Image 77Apollo Command Service Module in lunar orbit (from Space exploration)
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Image 79The sparse plasma (blue) and dust (white) in the tail of comet Hale–Bopp are being shaped by pressure from solar radiation and the solar wind, respectively.
Did you know (auto-generated)
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- ... that Louis W. Roberts was among the highest ranking African-American space program staff at NASA while the Apollo program was underway?
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