This 1973 picture is a polaroid of the TV screen from the Skylab space station’s Extreme Ultraviolet monitor. Taken by astronaut Owen Garriott of the Skylab 3 mission, this system had finally allowed humans to view the Sun’s image in the extreme ultraviolet radiation emitted from the corona (its extremely hot outer atmosphere). The picture was taken with a Land-Polaroid SX-70 camera and was the first time that this iconic Polaroid camera was used in space.
Hubble Space Telescope (HST) is a telescope that has been placed in low Earth orbit, about 559 km above the Earth’s surface. Hubble was launched by space shuttle Discovery (STS-31) on April 24, 1990. Unfortunately Hubble was hampered by a flawed optical system until astronauts could make significant repairs in 1993.
The potential benefits of carrying out astronomical observations from space were first suggested in 1923, by the German rocket pioneer Hermann Oberth. NASA worked on several initiatives and conducted proof of concept studies in the 1960s and 1970s that formed the basis of the Hubble Space Telescope. By sitting high above Earth’s atmosphere, Hubble can avoid all the background light and distortions that exist for telescopes on even the most remote areas of Earth. As a result, Hubble has provided astronomers and scientists with some amazing high resolution images of our universe. This has given us invaluable insights into how the universe came about, with some deep views into space and time.
This December 21, 1973 black and white picture of the Comet Kohoutek was taken from the Skylab space station while in Earth orbit, by a Skylab 4 mission astronaut.
Here is footage of a hangout done by NASA at the 2014 South by Southwest (SXSW) in Austin, Texas. Their topics of discussion included:
This is one of the first views of Mars as photographed by the Viking 2 lander in 1976. The trenches dug by Viking to analyze sub-surface samples (middle of picture) and the foot pad of the lander (lower right) are visible. But what is the circled cylindrical object? A part from the Viking 2 lander? It doesn’t look like the rest of the rocks in this Martian landscape.