Space pictures
This picture of Earth was taken by Alan Shepard on May 5, 1961 as part of NASA’s Mercury Redstone 3 space mission. The historic MR-3 launch allowed Shepard to become the first American (and second person) in space. He likely took this picture of Earth through the on board periscope. The 15 minute mission was put into orbit by an extended and up-powered version of the US Army’s Redstone ballistic missile – forming the Redstone Launch Vehicle.
The Mars Curiosity Rover was not be left behind the times. With the help of its Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI), a series of images were stitched together to put together this 2012 selfie of the Mars Curiosity Rover. In this picture, the rover is situated in the Gale Crater’s “Rocknest” area with Mount Sharp visible towards the right of the picture.
Jupiter is an amazing planet with sixty seven (as of 2014) confirmed moons. Callisto is one of its larger natural satellites, in fact bigger in size than the planet Mercury. NASA’s Voyager probe was sent to explore Jupiter and some of its moons and took this picture of Callisto in 1979. The bright portion is believed to be an impact crater about 600 km across. Callisto was discovered by Galileo Galilei in 1610 and over time it has been determined that Callisto is mostly composed of rock and ices (water and ammonia frozen in ice form due to extreme temperatures of about 120 degrees Kelvin or -243.67 degrees Fahrenheit at its equator).
Apollo 16 mission’s picture of the video camera on the moon, taken from the Lunar Module “Orion” by astronauts. Apollo 16 was the tenth NASA mission to the Moon and the fifth (and last) to land a manned module on the Moon. Commander John Young, Lunar Module Pilot Charles Duke spent just under three days on the Moon in the lander while Ken Mattingly piloted the “Casper” Command/Service Module.
The Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) took this picture of the open star cluster M7 in June, 2010 using a 100-millisecond manual exposure. The LORRI is part of NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft on its way to Pluto. Star cluster M7 (Messier 7) is also referred to as NGC 6475. It is an open cluster of stars in the constellation of Scorpius that is visible with the naked eye. This star cluster has been seen by humans since ancient times, and has also been called the Ptolemy Cluster after being discovered by the by the first century Greek-Roman astronomer, Ptolemy.
