The dark dunes on Mars, captured by the Curiosity rover.

An enhanced-color view, this image covers a 350 by 750 kilometer swath across the surface of Jupiter's tantalizing moon Europa. The close-up combines high-resolution image data with lower resolution color data from observations made in 1998 by the Galileo spacecraft. Smooth ice plains, long fractures, and jumbled blocks of chaos terrain are thought to hide a deep ocean of salty liquid water beneath. Though the ice-covered alien ocean world is outside the Solar System's habitable zone, new studies show the potential chemistry driving its oxygen and hydrogen production, a key indicator of the energy available for life, could produce amounts comparable in scale to planet Earth. Hydrogen would be generated by chemical reactions of the salty water in contact with the rocky ocean floor. Oxygen and other compounds that react with hydrogen would come from Europa's surface. There water ice molecules would be split apart by the intense flux of high-energy radiation from Jupiter and cycled into the Europan ocean from above.

Photo of the Orion spacecraft launching.

This illustration shows a star surrounded by a protoplanetary disk. Material from the thick disk flows along the star’s magnetic field lines and is deposited onto the star’s surface. When material hits the star, it lights up brightly.

Neil took this pan from a spot southeast of the LM while Buzz was removing equipment from the SEQ Bay.

A high-resolution view of Pluto taken by the New Horizons probe.

This image was created by splicing together images captured by the New Horizons space probe. Images are credited to the NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute.

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has revisited the famous Pillars of Creation, revealing a sharper and wider view of the structures in this visible-light image. Astronomers combined several Hubble exposures to assemble the wider view. The towering pillars are about 5 light-years tall. The dark, finger-like feature at bottom right may be a smaller version of the giant pillars. The new image was taken with Hubble's versatile and sharp-eyed Wide Field Camera 3. The pillars are bathed in the blistering ultraviolet light from a grouping of young, massive stars located off the top of the image. Streamers of gas can be seen bleeding off the pillars as the intense radiation heats and evaporates it into space. Denser regions of the pillars are shadowing material beneath them from the powerful radiation. Stars are being born deep inside the pillars, which are made of cold hydrogen gas laced with dust. The pillars are part of a small region of the Eagle Nebula, a vast star-forming region 6,500 light-years from Earth. The colors in the image highlight emission from several chemical elements. Oxygen emission is blue, sulfur is orange, and hydrogen and nitrogen are green.

NASA and NOAA satellite imagery showing how much of the Earth's surface is covered in vegetation.

View of Earth from a Satellite.

The giant star Zeta Ophiuchi is having a "shocking" effect on the surrounding dust clouds in this infrared image from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope. Stellar winds flowing out from this fast-moving star are making ripples in the dust as it approaches, creating a bow shock seen as glowing gossamer threads, which, for this star, are only seen in infrared light.

Groth strip as captured by Hubble.

ANGST Survey Galaxy taken by Hubble.

Picture of Galactic Center from Hubble.

This striking view of the central parts of the Milky Way was obtained with the VISTA survey telescope at ESO's Paranal Observatory in Chile. This huge picture is 108 500 by 81 500 pixels and contains nearly nine billion pixels. It was created by combining thousands of individual images from VISTA, taken through three different infra-red filters, into a single monumental mosaic. These data form part of the VVV public survey and have been used to study a much larger number of individual stars in the central parts of the Milky Way than ever before. Because VISTA has a camera sensitive to infra-red light it can see through much of the dust blocking the view for optical telescopes, although many more opaque dust filaments still show up well in this picture.

Quiet clouds blanket the above scene, lit from beneath by lights from the village of Trübbach. A snow covered mountain, Mittlerspitz, poses dramatically on the upper left, hovering over the small town of Balzers, Liechtenstein far below. Peaks from the Alps can be seen across the far right, just below the freshly rising Sun. Visible on the upper right are the crescent Moon and the bright planet Venus.

The Sun, Earth and Moon as seen from space.

A NASA photo of the first time a Cubesat has been deployed from the JAM module on the ISS.

A cropped photo of an original NASA photo taken at Gusev Crater, Mars.

An astronaut outside of the shuttle - waving hello.

The sun rises a little more than two and half hours before the Soyuz spacecraft with Expedition 31 Soyuz Commander Gennady Padalka, Flight Engineer Sergei Revin, and NASA Flight Engineer Joe Acaba aboard launched to the International Space station on Tuesday, May 15, 2012 in Baikonur, Kazakhstan.

The Earth, completely cloudless.

A runaway star - CW Leo, plowing through the depths of space and piling up interstellar material before it, can be seen in this ultraviolet image from NASA's Galaxy Evolution Explorer.

PIA13241 - "The Invisible Dragon".

Astronaut Clay Anderson, Expedition 15 flight engineer, waves to the camera while participating in a session of extravehicular activity as construction continues on the International Space Station.