Category: Image of the day

Ophir Chasma forms the northern portion of the vast Mars canyon system Valles Marineris, and this image, acquired on Aug. 10, 2015, by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, features a small part of its wall and floor.

The Orion spacecraft service module stacking assembly interface ring and stack holding stand are secured on a special transportation platform and are being loaded into NASA’s Super Guppy aircraft at the Shuttle Landing Facility at Kennedy Space Center. On Nov. 3, the Guppy flew from Kennedy to Glenn Research Center’s Plum Brook Station facility.

NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center engineers are working on an increasingly complex aircraft called the Preliminary Research Aerodynamic Design to Lower Drag, or Prandtl-D. The aircraft features a new method for determining the shape of the wing with a twist that could lead to an 11-percent reduction in fuel consumption.

Tropical Cyclone Chapala made landfall on mainland Yemen early on November 3, 2015, dumping torrential rains across the arid landscape.

NASA is developing and demonstrating technologies to service and repair satellites in distant orbits. This photo looks closely at one of the tools that could be used for satellite servicing in the future: the Visual Inspection Poseable Invertebrate Robot (VIPIR), a robotic, articulating borescope equipped with a second motorized, zoom-lens camera.

On Nov. 2, 2000, the Expedition 1 crew – Commander William M. (Bill) Shepherd of NASA and Flight Engineer Sergei Krikalev and Soyuz Commander Yuri Gidzenko of Roscosmos – arrived at the International Space Station, marking the start of an uninterrupted human presence on the orbiting laboratory.

This unprocessed “raw” image of Saturn’s icy, geologically active moon Enceladus was acquired by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft during its dramatic Oct. 28, 2015 flyby in which the probe passed about 30 miles (49 kilometers) above the moon’s south polar region.