Space Images of the Day: Latest from NASA, ISS, Marshall, Webb

NASA Image of the Day
The latest NASA "Image of the Day" image.


Chennai City Lights
26 May 2026 at 8:50am
Chennai, on India's southern coast along the Bay of Bengal and with a metropolitan population of about 8.7 million, shines with white LED streetlights in this photograph taken at approximately 9:13 p.m. local time on May 2, 2026, from the International Space Station.


Webb Studies Star Clusters
22 May 2026 at 12:26pm
This near-infrared image shows a section of one of the spiral arms of Messier 51 (M51).


Hubble Sights Galaxy in Transition
21 May 2026 at 11:38am
This NASA Hubble Space Telescope images reveals the lenticular galaxy, NGC 1266. This enigmatic post-starburst galaxy has a bright center and a face that hints at spiral structure, yet it holds no discernable spiral arms.


Psyche Spacecraft Completes Mars Flyby
21 May 2026 at 11:38am
NASA?s Psyche spacecraft completed its close approach of Mars on May 15, capturing images as it came within 2,864 miles (4,609 kilometers) of the planet?s surface. This is an enhanced-color view of the large double-ring crater Huygens and the surrounding heavily cratered southern highlands.


Moon-Venus Conjunction
19 May 2026 at 11:08am
The Moon and Venus, center, are seen in conjunction above the Washington Monument, Monday, May 18, 2026, as viewed from the Mary W. Jackson NASA Headquarters Building in Washington.


Beacon of Light
18 May 2026 at 9:32am
This latest Picture of the Month from the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope features Messier 77 (M77), a barred spiral galaxy famous and appreciated among astronomers for its combination of relative proximity and spectacular features to study. It is located 45 million light-years away in the constellation Cetus (The Whale).


Curiosity Shakes Loose a Pesky Rock
15 May 2026 at 9:05am
NASA?s Curiosity Mars rover used its Mast Camera, or Mastcam, to capture this view of a rock nicknamed ?Atacama? on May 6, 2026, the 4,877th Martian day, or sol, of the mission. The rock had gotten stuck to the drill on the end of Curiosity?s robotic arm on April 25.


Fresh Food Delivery for Space Station
14 May 2026 at 8:56am
You're allowed to play with your food when you're on the International Space Station! To celebrate a delivery of fresh food, NASA astronauts Jack Hathaway (bottom left), Jessica Meir (middle left), and Chris Williams (bottom right), and ESA (European Space Agency) astronaut Sophie Adenot (top right) pose for a group photo.


Rise Goes to Washington
13 May 2026 at 1:20pm
?Rise,? the Artemis II zero gravity indicator, is seen sitting on the dais as the Artemis II astronauts speak with congressional staff, Tuesday, May 12, 2026, in Washington.


Perseverance Stuns in New Selfie
12 May 2026 at 11:23am
NASA?s Perseverance Mars rover recently took a self-portrait against a sweeping backdrop of ancient Martian terrain at a location the science team calls ?Lac de Charmes.?


NASA Astronaut Jessica Meir
11 May 2026 at 8:01am
NASA astronaut Jessica Meir poses with an Extravehicular Mobility Unit (EMU) spacesuit during an official portrait session at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston.


Glowing Views from the Space Station
8 May 2026 at 9:23am
This celestial image captured from a window on a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft docked to the International Space Station highlights the Milky Way rising above Earth's atmospheric glow.


A Light in the Dark
7 May 2026 at 9:31am
A sliver of the edge of Earth is brightly illuminated against the vast darkness of space.

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Uploads from NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center


Great Balls of Fire
26 May 2026 at 10:44am

NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center posted a photo:

The outermost layers of Earth?s atmosphere, the thermosphere and exosphere, are relatively busy places. In these layers, tens of thousands of trackable objects, including satellites and various types of debris, orbit the planet. They are also where dozens of tons of meteoric material enter daily, occasionally producing bright fireballs as the pieces burn up.

Given all of this, there's a non-zero chance that an astronaut might spot something fiery in the distance when looking out from the dome-shaped cupola on the International Space Station. That's precisely what one crew member saw and photographed as the station passed over West Africa on April 27, 2026. The astronaut was looking for Progress 95, an incoming cargo craft. Instead, they spotted a bright object directly below, streaking through the upper atmosphere.

Credit: NASA

#NASA #InternationalSpaceStation #ISS #Launch #Astronauts #SpaceStation #science

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#MemorialDay is a time to honor and remember the people that gave their lives for our country. To those who put our nation before themselves, and to their family and friends left behind, we honor your sacrifice.

This image shows NASA?s SLS (Space Launch System) and Orion spacecraft for the Artemis II mission at NASA?s Kennedy Space Center. NASA's massive Crawler-Transporter, upgraded for the Artemis program, carried the powerful SLS rocket and Orion spacecraft on the Mobile Launcher from the Vehicle Assembly Building to Launch Pad 39B ahead of the mission. The U.S. flag is prominenet in this image - attached to the base of the mobile launcher.

Image Credit: NASA/Brandon Hancock

#NASAMarshall #NASAMarshall #NASA #MemorialDay

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This NASA Hubble Space Telescope image reveals an enigmatic galaxy with a bright center and a face that hints at spiral structure, yet it holds no obvious spiral arms. Reddish-brown clumps and filaments of dust partially obscure the galaxy?s full face, while red, blue, and orange light from distant galaxies shines through its diffuse outer regions and dots the inky-black background.

NGC 1266 is a lenticular galaxy located some 100 million light-years away in the constellation Eridanus (the Celestial River). Astronomers classify lenticulars as transitional galaxies that represent an evolutionary bridge between spirals and ellipticals. Lenticulars are ?lens-shaped? and have a bright central bulge and flattened disk like spirals, but they have no spiral arms and little to no star formation like ellipticals.

Credit: NASA, ESA, K. Alatalo (STScI); Image Processing: G. Kober (NASA/Catholic University of America)

#NASAMarshall #NASA #NASAHubble #Hubble #NASAGoddard #galaxy

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The heart of galaxy M77 shines brightly in this May 7, 2026, image from NASA?s James Webb Space Telescope. The intense glow is due to gas being pulled by the strong gravity of the central black hole into a tight and rapid orbit around it. The motion of the gas causes it to heat up, releasing tremendous amounts of radiation.

The bright lines radiating out of the center are diffraction spikes. The spikes are not a physical feature of the galaxy, but an optical effect caused by the telescope itself.

Credit: ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA, A. Leroy

#NASAMarshall #NASA #NASAWebb #JWST #JamesWebbSpaceTelescope #NASAGoddard #galaxy

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On May 15, NASA's #MissionToPsyche used Mars to perform a "gravity assist" flyby. This maneuver gave the spacecraft a boost to its ultimate destination, the asteroid Psyche, which it will explore in 2029.

At its closest approach, the spacecraft was 2,800 miles above Mars surface and traveling at a speed of 12,300 mph! These are just a few of the images captured by the cameras aboard the spacecraft before, during, and after the flyby.

Captured by the multispectral imager instrument on NASA?s Psyche mission, this is an enhanced-color view of the large double-ring crater Huygens (upper right; about 290 miles, or 470 kilometers, in diameter) and the surrounding heavily cratered southern highlands near 15 degrees south latitude. The various colors in this dramatic scene are likely due to differences in the compositional properties of dust, sand, and bedrock in this ancient terrain. The image scale is around 2,200 feet (670 meters) per pixel.

Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU

#SolarSystemandBeyond #NASAJPL #NASAMarshall #jpl #psyche #asteroid #Psyche #Mars

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Like the Milky Way, the Whirlpool is a spiral galaxy with spectacular arms of stars and dust. M51 is located about 25 million light years from Earth, and its face-on orientation to Earth gives us a perspective that we can never get of our own spiral galactic home. By studying the Whirlpool in X-ray light, astronomers can reveal things that would otherwise be invisible in other wavelengths. For example, nearly a million seconds of observing time from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory were used to create this new image. These 2014 data reveal over 400 X-ray sources within the galaxy. Most of these are so-called X-ray binary systems, in which a neutron star or black hole is in orbit with a star like our Sun. Understanding where these systems are, how they behave over time, and their role in the evolution of the galaxy in important is helping learn us more about other galaxies including our own.

Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/Wesleyan Univ./R.Kilgard, et al;

#NASA #NASAMarshall #NASAChandra #ChandraXray #ChandraXrayObservatory #SolarSystem #galaxy

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A team of researchers from Adelaide University, ESA (European Space Agency) F-lab, Thales Alenia Space, and the SmartSat Cooperative Research Center in South Australia has successfully uploaded and demonstrated NASA and IBM?s open-source Prithvi Geospatial artificial intelligence (AI) foundation model aboard two in-orbit platforms, making it the first geospatial foundation model to be deployed in orbit. Trained on 13 years? worth of data, Prithvi can facilitate a wide variety of Earth observation tasks.

By uploading a compressed version of Prithvi to the South Australian government?s Kanyini satellite and to the Thales Alenia Space IMAGIN-e (ISS Mounted Accessible Global Imaging Nod-e) payload aboard the International Space Station, the researchers tested the model?s flood and cloud detection performance across two different orbiting platforms and computing environments.

Developed by a team of data scientists from IBM and NASA?s IMPACT AI team within the Office of Data Science and Informatics at NASA?s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, the Prithvi Geospatial model was trained on the Harmonized Landsat and Sentinel-2 dataset. This dataset compiles over a decade of global geospatial data from NASA?s Landsat and ESA (European Space Agency) Sentinel-2 satellites. Prithvi can be adapted for tasks such as mapping flood plains, monitoring disasters, and predicting crop yields.

In this image, Florida is seen from the International Space Station. A NASA geospatial AI foundation model was deployed to a platform aboard the space station for the first time, unlocking new opportunities for Earth observation.

Credit: NASA

#NASA #Prithvi #ScienceData #AI #ArtificialIntelligence #science #NASAMarshall

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NASA astronaut Chris Williams captured the Milky Way rising above Earth?s atmospheric glow on April 13, 2026, while aboard a SpaceX Dragon docked to the International Space Station.

This atmospheric glow is also called airglow. It occurs when atoms and molecules in the upper atmosphere, excited by sunlight, emit light to shed their excess energy. Alternatively, it can happen when atoms and molecules that have been ionized by sunlight collide with and capture a free electron. In both cases, they eject a particle of light ? called a photon ? in order to relax again. The phenomenon is similar to auroras, but where auroras are driven by high-energy particles originating from the solar wind, airglow is energized by ordinary, day-to-day solar radiation.

Credit: NASA/Chris Williams

#NASA #InternationalSpaceStation #ISS #Launch #Astronauts #SpaceStation #science

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The Near-Earth Object (NEO) Surveyor ? NASA?s first infrared space telescope purposely designed to discover potentially hazardous asteroids and comets ? is undergoing integration and testing. With launch set for no earlier than September 2027, teams across the United States are hard at work building the spacecraft?s components, planning the kind of survey and science it will do, and developing the software to process the huge quantity of data the mission will generate.

In 2005, Congress tasked NASA with discovering potentially hazardous near-Earth objects, or NEOs, but many of these objects are difficult to find with ground-based surveys. Some are as dark as charcoal, others are tiny, and many lurk in the glare of the Sun, where ground-based optical telescopes can?t see. To mitigate this, NEO Surveyor is being custom-built to scan the solar system to detect objects that will glow in the infrared as they are heated by the Sun ? as opposed to the optical light they reflect, which is what ground-based surveys measure ? to provide enough advance warning for humanity to do something about them, if necessary.

The spacecraft will travel about a million miles (1.5 million kilometers) from our planet in the direction of the Sun to a region of gravitational stability called the Sun-Earth Lagrange point (or L1 point), continuously scanning large swaths of the sky for at least five years in search of NEOs that have yet to be found.

In this image, engineers attach the aluminum telescope for NASA?s NEO Surveyor to the flight base frame at Space Dynamics Laboratory in Logan, Utah, in September 2025. The telescope is connected via a system of struts that prevents heat from passing from the spacecraft to the instrument.

Credit: Space Dynamics Laboratory/Allison Bills

#NASAMarshall #NASA #astrophysics #NASA #astronomy #nearearthobjects #NEOSurveyor #NASAJPL #asteroids #NEO #NearEarthObject

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Turns out deep space travel is just like road trips, eventually you have to pull over and refuel :fuelpump:

NASA is collaborating with Eta Space of Rockledge, Florida, on an in?orbit technology demonstration to advance a key capability for future deep space missions. The Liquid Oxygen Flight Demonstration, or LOXSAT, will test cryogenic fluid management technologies necessary for creating in-space propellant depots, essentially gas stations in space, that could support long-term exploration.

During a nine-month mission set to launch no earlier than July 17, LOXSAT will demonstrate 11 cryogenic fluid management technologies. The technologies that LOXSAT will demonstrate were selected to address the core challenges of using cryogenic, or super-cold, propellants in microgravity, including reducing boiloff, transferring propellant, maintaining tank pressure, and gauging propellant levels.

Visual description: The LOXSAT payload is displayed inside Rocket Lab?s Spacecraft Production Complex in Long Beach, California.

Credit: Rocket Lab

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On Friday, May 15, NASA?s Psyche spacecraft will get a boost from Mars, passing just 2,800 miles (4,500 kilometers) from the planet?s surface. The spacecraft will harness the planet?s gravitational pull to speed up and adjust its trajectory toward the metal-rich asteroid Psyche for eventual arrival in 2029.

Launched on Oct. 13, 2023, the Psyche spacecraft relies on a solar-electric propulsion system and the inert gas xenon for propellant, gradually gaining speed over the course of its long journey. Psyche?s mission planners are using the Mars flyby to save propellant, letting the planet?s gravity do some of the work instead of the propulsion system alone. But gravity assists like these also offer opportunities for missions to practice and to calibrate their science instruments.

This colorized image of Mars was captured by NASA?s Psyche mission on May 3, 2026, about 3 million miles (4.8 million kilometers) from the planet.

Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU

#SolarSystemandBeyond #NASAJPL #NASAMarshall #jpl #psyche #asteroid #Psyche #Mars

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NASA's Artemis III mission will be a crewed flight in Earth orbit that will test rendezvous and docking capabilities between the agency?s Orion spacecraft and commercial landers from Blue Origin and SpaceX.

Instead of using the interim cryogenic propulsion stage as the upper stage of the SLS (Space Launch System) rocket for this mission, NASA will use a ?spacer,? a representation of the mass and overall dimensions of an upper stage but without propulsive capabilities.

Design and fabrication activities for the spacer are progressing rapidly at #NASAMarshall. Material for the barrel section and the upper and lower rings is currently being machined at our center in preparation for upcoming welding operations.

Visual description: The SLS rocket and Orion spacecraft for Artemis II sit on the launchpad at NASA's Kennedy Space Center on March 30, 2026. The interim cryogenic propulsion stage is housed in the upper stage of the rocket pictured here in this close-up view - for Artemis III, the ICPS will be replaced with a spacer.

Credit: NASA/Eric Bordelon

#NASA #NASAArtemis #HumanLanders #HLS #HumanLandingSystem #Moon #MoonLanding #NASAMarshall #HLS #LunarLander #BlueOrigin #Artemis #ArtemisII #ArtemisIII

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Through NASA, a university-designed small spacecraft is paving the way to studying particles, known as neutrinos, that move through the universe at near-light speeds. The Solar Neutrino Astro-Particle PhYsics CubeSat, known as SNAPPY, launched at 12 a.m. PDT on Sunday aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Space Launch Complex 4 East at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California and was deployed via launch integraor Exolaunch.

The SNAPPY project will test a prototype solar neutrino detector in low Earth polar orbit. Weighing approximately half a pound, the prototype detector consists of four crystals and is encased in a shielding block made of epoxy loaded with tungsten dust to match the density of steel. The detector and a dedicated electronics stack for power and readout purposes are housed inside a CubeSat platform from Kongsberg NanoAvionics.

NASA?s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, designed and built the dedicated electronic readout cards for the SNAPPY detector, and Wichita State University graduate students programmed the payload computer to interact with the electronics.

Credit: SpaceX

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