Astronomyandgalaxies - GalaxyBrain

NASA spacewalker Michael Hopkins

iss064e027386 (Jan. 27, 2021) --- NASA spacewalker and Expedition 64 Flight Engineer Michael Hopkins works to ready the International Space station's port-side truss structure for future solar array upgrades.

NASA Johnson on Flickr

spacey painting i also made for my boyfriend :)

i really like this one actually 😊

James Webb Space Telescope image of Pillars of Creation

the number of spacecraft failures recently has been absolutely insane and it all comes down to tech bros barging into the industry going "it's not that hard wtf is nasa so bad" and then completely skipping out on any testing

Beautiful super Moon from earlier in the year!

Backyard views

Tuesday February 4th 2025 6:39pm & 6:44pm

To be fair, a lot of goofy-sounding rocketry/aerospace terminology has a legitimate nomenclatural role beyond just being silly euphemisms.

"Unplanned rapid disassembly", for example, exists as the necessary counterpart to planned rapid disassembly: sometimes a rocket is legitimately supposed to fall apart or blow up, so you need a specific term to emphasise that it wasn't supposed to do that.

Similarly, "lithobraking" was coined by analogy with aerobraking (shedding velocity via atmospheric friction) and hydrobraking (shedding velocity by landing in water), and it does have some intentional applications; the Mars Pathfinder probe, for example, was deliberately crashed into the Martian surface while surrounded by giant airbags, and reportedly bounced at least 15 times before coming to rest.

(That said, aerospace engineers absolutely do use these terms humorously as well, because engineers are just Like That.)

Let’s fly into Jupiter! Does this ball of gas have a surface? Let’s see!

Astronomy Picture of the Day

2025 January 28

Comet G3 ATLAS over Uruguay

A foreground grass field is shown below a distant field of stars. On the grass field are some trees. Dwarfing the trees, in the sky, is a comet with a long tail.

Image Credit & Copyright: Mauricio Salazar

Explanation: Comets can be huge. When far from the Sun, a comet's size usually refers to its hard nucleus of ice and rock, which typically spans a few kilometers -- smaller than even a small moon. When nearing the Sun, however, this nucleus can eject dust and gas and leave a thin tail that can spread to an enormous length -- even greater than the distance between the Earth and the Sun. Pictured, C/2024 G3 (ATLAS) sports a tail of sunlight-reflecting dust and glowing gas that spans several times the apparent size of a full moon, appearing even larger on long duration camera images than to the unaided eye. The featured image shows impressive Comet ATLAS over trees and a grass field in Sierras de Mahoma, San Jose, Uruguay about a week ago. After being prominent in the sunset skies of Earth's southern hemisphere, Comet G3 ATLAS is now fading as it moves away from the Sun, making its impressive tails increasingly hard to see.

Authors & editors: Robert Nemiroff (MTU) & Jerry Bonnell (UMCP)

NASA Official: Amber Straughn

A service of: ASD at NASA / GSFC,

NASA Science Activation

& Michigan Tech. U.