Friends of NASA (FoN) is an independent non-governmental organization (NGO) dedicated to building international support for peaceful space exploration, commerce, scientific discovery, and STEM education.
Preparing for a More Powerful International Space Station | This Week @NASA
Week of Jan. 20, 2023: Preparing for a more powerful space station, building a more fuel-efficient aircraft, and a way to possibly predict solar flares . . . a few of the stories to tell you about—This Week at NASA!
Credit: National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)
NASA's Space to Ground: First Timers | Week of Jan. 20, 2023
NASA's Space to Ground is your weekly update on what's happening aboard the International Space Station. NASA astronaut Nicole Mann and Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) astronaut Koichi Wakata concluded their spacewalk on Jan. 20, 2023, at 3:35 p.m. EST after 7 hours and 21 minutes.
Mann and Wakata completed work left over from a previous spacewalk for a platform on which a set of International Space Station Roll-Out Solar Arrays (iROSAs) for the station’s 1B power channel will be installed later this year, as well as most of the work to install a similar mounting platform for a set of iROSAs for the 1A power channel. Due to time constraints, plans to bolt a final strut for the second platform were deferred until a future spacewalk. There is no impact to station operations.
The installation is part of a series of spacewalks to augment the International Space Station’s power channels with new iROSAs. Four iROSAs have been installed so far, and two more will be mounted to the platforms installed during this spacewalk in the future.
It was the 258th spacewalk in support of space station assembly, upgrades, and maintenance, the first spacewalk of 2023, and the first spacewalk for both astronauts.
Mann and Wakata are in the midst of a planned six-month science mission living and working aboard the microgravity laboratory to advance scientific knowledge and demonstrate new technologies for future human and robotic exploration missions, including lunar missions through NASA’s Artemis program.
Learn more about the important research being operated on Station:
Expedition 68: New Crew & Earth Photos | International Space Station
NASA astronaut and Expedition 68 Flight Engineer Nicole Mann is pictured during a fit check of her Extravehicular Mobility Unit (EMU), or spacesuit, ahead of a planned spacewalk
Expedition 68 Flight Engineer Koichi Wakata of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) is pictured during a fit check of his Extravehicular Mobility Unit (EMU), or spacesuit, ahead of a planned spacewalk
Nicole and Koichi are pictured during a fit check of their Extravehicular Mobility Units (EMUs), or spacesuit, inside the Quest airlock ahead of a planned spacewalk
Cosmonaut Anna Kikina (Russia) works on life support maintenance tasks
Station Commander: Sergey Prokopyev of Roscosmos (Russia)
Roscosmos (Russia): Flight Engineers Anna Kikina & Dmitri Petelin
NASA: Flight Engineers Nicole Mann, Frank Rubio & Josh Cassada
JAXA (Japan): Flight Engineer Koichi Wakata
An international partnership of space agencies provides and operates the elements of the International Space Station (ISS). The principals are the space agencies of the United States, Russia, Europe, Japan, and Canada. The ISS has been the most politically complex space exploration program ever undertaken.
"Enjoy these stunning Earth views from the China Space Station. Take a four-minute space tour! Happy Chinese New Year/Spring Festival 2023! Year of The Rabbit!"
Shenzhou-15 Crew Members:
Fei Junlong (commander), Zhang Lu (taikonaut), and Deng Qingming (taikonaut)
The Island Nation of Madagascar in The Indian Ocean | International Space Station
The island nation of Madagascar, looking north toward Earth's horizon, is pictured from the International Space Station as it orbited 262 miles above the Indian Ocean.
Station Commander: Sergey Prokopyev of Roscosmos (Russia)
Roscosmos (Russia): Flight Engineers Anna Kikina & Dmitri Petelin
NASA: Flight Engineers Nicole Mann, Frank Rubio & Josh Cassada
JAXA (Japan): Flight Engineer Koichi Wakata
An international partnership of space agencies provides and operates the elements of the International Space Station (ISS). The principals are the space agencies of the United States, Russia, Europe, Japan, and Canada. The ISS has been the most politically complex space exploration program ever undertaken.
Light Pollution: Stars Disappearing, Citizen Scientists Report | Globe at Night
The infographic above illustrates the impact of light pollution on our ability to see stars and other objects in the night sky.
A startling analysis from Globe at Night—a citizen science program run by the National Science Foundation’s NOIRLab—concludes that stars are disappearing from human sight at an astonishing rate. The study finds that, to human eyes, artificial lighting has dulled the night sky more rapidly than indicated by satellite measurements. The study published in the journal Science showcases the unique contributions that citizen scientists can make in essential fields of research.
From the glowing arc of the Milky Way to dozens of intricate constellations, the unaided human eye should be able to perceive several thousand stars on a clear, dark night. Unfortunately, growing light pollution has robbed about 30% of people around the globe and approximately 80% of people in the United States of the nightly view of their home galaxy. A new paper published in the journal Science concludes that the problem is getting rapidly worse.
New citizen-science-based research sheds alarming light on the problem of ‘skyglow’—the diffuse illumination of the night sky that is a form of light pollution. The data for this study came from crowd-sourced observations collected from around the world as part of Globe at Night, a program run by the NSF’s NOIRLab and developed by NOIRLab astronomer Connie Walker. The research reveals that skyglow is increasing more rapidly than shown in satellite measurements of Earth's surface brightness at night.
“At this rate of change, a child born in a location where 250 stars were visible would be able to see only around 100 by the time they turned 18,” said Christopher Kyba, a researcher at the German Research Centre for Geosciences and lead author of the paper detailing these results.
Light pollution is a familiar problem that has many detrimental effects, not only on the practice of astronomy. It also has an impact on human health and wildlife, since it disrupts the cyclical transition from sunlight to starlight that biological systems have evolved alongside. Furthermore, the loss of visible stars is a poignant loss of human cultural heritage. Until relatively recently, humans throughout history had an impressive view of the starry night sky, and the effect of this nightly spectacle is evident in ancient cultures, from the myths it inspired to the structures that were built in alignment with celestial bodies.
Despite being a well-recognized issue, however, the changes in sky brightness over time are not well documented, particularly on a global scale.
Globe at Night has been gathering data on stellar visibility every year since 2006. Anyone can submit observations through the Globe at Night web application: https://www.globeatnight.org/webapp/ on a desktop or smartphone. After entering the relevant date, time and location, participants are shown a number of star maps. They then record which one best matches what they can see in the sky without any telescopes or other instruments.
This gives an estimate of what is called the naked eye limiting magnitude, which is a measure of how bright an object must be in order to be seen. This can be used to estimate the brightness of skyglow, because as the sky brightens, the fainter objects disappear from sight.
The authors of the paper analyzed more than 50,000 observations submitted to Globe at Night between 2011 and 2022, ensuring consistency by omitting entries that were affected by factors including cloud cover and moonlight. They focused on data from Europe and North America, since these regions had a sufficient distribution of observations across the land area as well as throughout the decade studied. The paper notes that the sky is likely brightening more quickly in developing countries, where satellite observations indicate the prevalence of artificial lighting is growing at a higher rate.
After devising a new method to convert these observations into estimates of the change in skyglow, the authors found that the loss of visible stars reported by Globe at Night indicates an increase in sky brightness of 9.6% per year over the past decade. This is much greater than the roughly 2% per year global increase in surface brightness measured by satellites.
“This shows that existing satellites aren't sufficient to study how Earth's night is changing,” said Kyba. “We've developed a way to ‘translate’ Globe at Night observations of star visibility made at different locations from year to year into continent-wide trends of sky brightness change. That shows that Globe at Night is not just an interesting outreach activity, it is an essential measurement of one of Earth's environmental variables.”
Existing satellites are not well suited to measuring skyglow as it appears to humans, because there are no current instruments monitoring the whole Earth that can detect wavelengths shorter than 500 nanometers, which corresponds to the color cyan, or greenish blue. Shorter wavelengths, however, contribute disproportionately to skyglow, because they scatter more effectively in the atmosphere. White LEDs, now increasingly commonly used in high-efficiency outdoor lighting, have a peak in emission between 400 and 500 nanometers.
“Since human eyes are more sensitive to these shorter wavelengths at nighttime, LED lights have a strong effect on our perception of sky brightness,” said Kyba. “This could be one of the reasons behind the discrepancy between satellite measurements and the sky conditions reported by Globe at Night participants.”
Beyond wavelength differences, space-based instruments do not measure light emitted horizontally very well, such as from illuminated signs or windows, but these sources are significant contributors to skyglow as seen from the ground. Crowd-sourced observations will therefore always be invaluable for investigating the direct human effects of sky brightness.
“The increase in skyglow over the past decade underscores the importance of redoubling our efforts and developing new strategies to protect dark skies,” said Walker. “The Globe at Night dataset is indispensable in our ongoing evaluation of changes in skyglow, and we encourage everyone who can to get involved to help protect the starry night sky.”
Credit: NOIRLab/National Science Foundation (NSF)/Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA), P. Marenfeld
Light Pollution: Stars Disappearing, Citizen Scientists Report | Globe at Night
The infographic above illustrates the impact of light pollution on our ability to see stars and other objects in the night sky.
A startling analysis from Globe at Night—a citizen science program run by the National Science Foundation’s NOIRLab—concludes that stars are disappearing from human sight at an astonishing rate. The study finds that, to human eyes, artificial lighting has dulled the night sky more rapidly than indicated by satellite measurements. The study published in the journal Science showcases the unique contributions that citizen scientists can make in essential fields of research.
From the glowing arc of the Milky Way to dozens of intricate constellations, the unaided human eye should be able to perceive several thousand stars on a clear, dark night. Unfortunately, growing light pollution has robbed about 30% of people around the globe and approximately 80% of people in the United States of the nightly view of their home galaxy. A new paper published in the journal Science concludes that the problem is getting rapidly worse.
New citizen-science-based research sheds alarming light on the problem of ‘skyglow’—the diffuse illumination of the night sky that is a form of light pollution. The data for this study came from crowd-sourced observations collected from around the world as part of Globe at Night, a program run by the NSF’s NOIRLab and developed by NOIRLab astronomer Connie Walker. The research reveals that skyglow is increasing more rapidly than shown in satellite measurements of Earth's surface brightness at night.
“At this rate of change, a child born in a location where 250 stars were visible would be able to see only around 100 by the time they turned 18,” said Christopher Kyba, a researcher at the German Research Centre for Geosciences and lead author of the paper detailing these results.
Light pollution is a familiar problem that has many detrimental effects, not only on the practice of astronomy. It also has an impact on human health and wildlife, since it disrupts the cyclical transition from sunlight to starlight that biological systems have evolved alongside. Furthermore, the loss of visible stars is a poignant loss of human cultural heritage. Until relatively recently, humans throughout history had an impressive view of the starry night sky, and the effect of this nightly spectacle is evident in ancient cultures, from the myths it inspired to the structures that were built in alignment with celestial bodies.
Despite being a well-recognized issue, however, the changes in sky brightness over time are not well documented, particularly on a global scale.
Globe at Night has been gathering data on stellar visibility every year since 2006. Anyone can submit observations through the Globe at Night web application: https://www.globeatnight.org/webapp/ on a desktop or smartphone. After entering the relevant date, time and location, participants are shown a number of star maps. They then record which one best matches what they can see in the sky without any telescopes or other instruments.
This gives an estimate of what is called the naked eye limiting magnitude, which is a measure of how bright an object must be in order to be seen. This can be used to estimate the brightness of skyglow, because as the sky brightens, the fainter objects disappear from sight.
The authors of the paper analyzed more than 50,000 observations submitted to Globe at Night between 2011 and 2022, ensuring consistency by omitting entries that were affected by factors including cloud cover and moonlight. They focused on data from Europe and North America, since these regions had a sufficient distribution of observations across the land area as well as throughout the decade studied. The paper notes that the sky is likely brightening more quickly in developing countries, where satellite observations indicate the prevalence of artificial lighting is growing at a higher rate.
After devising a new method to convert these observations into estimates of the change in skyglow, the authors found that the loss of visible stars reported by Globe at Night indicates an increase in sky brightness of 9.6% per year over the past decade. This is much greater than the roughly 2% per year global increase in surface brightness measured by satellites.
“This shows that existing satellites aren't sufficient to study how Earth's night is changing,” said Kyba. “We've developed a way to ‘translate’ Globe at Night observations of star visibility made at different locations from year to year into continent-wide trends of sky brightness change. That shows that Globe at Night is not just an interesting outreach activity, it is an essential measurement of one of Earth's environmental variables.”
Existing satellites are not well suited to measuring skyglow as it appears to humans, because there are no current instruments monitoring the whole Earth that can detect wavelengths shorter than 500 nanometers, which corresponds to the color cyan, or greenish blue. Shorter wavelengths, however, contribute disproportionately to skyglow, because they scatter more effectively in the atmosphere. White LEDs, now increasingly commonly used in high-efficiency outdoor lighting, have a peak in emission between 400 and 500 nanometers.
“Since human eyes are more sensitive to these shorter wavelengths at nighttime, LED lights have a strong effect on our perception of sky brightness,” said Kyba. “This could be one of the reasons behind the discrepancy between satellite measurements and the sky conditions reported by Globe at Night participants.”
Beyond wavelength differences, space-based instruments do not measure light emitted horizontally very well, such as from illuminated signs or windows, but these sources are significant contributors to skyglow as seen from the ground. Crowd-sourced observations will therefore always be invaluable for investigating the direct human effects of sky brightness.
“The increase in skyglow over the past decade underscores the importance of redoubling our efforts and developing new strategies to protect dark skies,” said Walker. “The Globe at Night dataset is indispensable in our ongoing evaluation of changes in skyglow, and we encourage everyone who can to get involved to help protect the starry night sky.”
Credit: NOIRLab/National Science Foundation (NSF)/Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA), P. Marenfeld
Artemis I Orion Moon Mission: Commander Moonikin Campos | NASA Kennedy
Joe Leblanc, Orion payload and cargo manager with Lockheed Martin, secures Commander Moonikin Campos, a sensored stand-in for humans from NASA's Artemis I mission, inside its transport crate in the Space Station Processing Facility at Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Jan. 10, 2023, for its trip back to NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston.
Moonikin Campos was secured inside the Orion spacecraft for the mission beyond the Moon and back to Earth. Artemis I Orion launched atop the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket from Kennedyâs Launch Complex 39B on Nov. 16, 2022, at 1:47 a.m. EST for a 25-day trip beyond the Moon and back. During the flight, Orion flew farther than any human-rated spacecraft has ever flown, paving the way for human deep space exploration and demonstrating NASA's commitment and capability to extend human presence to the Moon and beyond.
The primary goal of Artemis I was to thoroughly test the SLS and Orion spacecraftâs integrated systems before crewed missions. Under Artemis, NASA aims to land the first woman and first person of color on the Moon and establish sustainable lunar exploration.
Credit: NASA's Kennedy Space Center (KSC)/Cory Huston
Planetary Missions: Fossils of Our Solar System | NASA Goddard
When the Hubble Space Telescope launched, one of its main goals was to learn more about our incredible universe. While we’re used to Hubble images coming from thousands of light-years away, Hubble is also capable of looking at objects in our solar system. Using Hubble, astronomers have been able to help planetary missions, like New Horizons and Lucy, plan out their own discoveries.
Artemis I Orion Moon Mission: Helga & Zohar (MARE) | NASA Kennedy
After a 25-day flight inside the Artemis I Orion crew module beyond the Moon and back, Helga, one of two identical phantom torsos, is shown without a radiation detection vest while undergoing post-flight payload inspections inside the Space Station Processing Facility at Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Jan. 11, 2023. The detectors will be removed at Kennedy and the torsos will return to teams at the German Space Agency for further analysis. As part of the Matroshka AstroRad Radiation Experiment (MARE) investigation, two female manikins—Helga and Zohar—were equipped with radiation detectors, while Zohar also wore a radiation protection vest, to determine the radiation risk during the Artemis I mission and potentially reduce exposure during future missions with astronauts.
Artemis I Orion launched atop the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket from Kennedy’s Launch Complex 39B on Nov. 16, 2022, at 1:47 a.m. EST. During the flight, Orion flew farther than any spacecraft built for humans has ever flown, paving the way for human deep space exploration and demonstrating NASA’s commitment and capability to extend human presence to the Moon and beyond. The primary goal of Artemis I was to thoroughly test the SLS and Orion spacecraft’s integrated systems before crewed missions. Under Artemis, NASA aims to land the first woman and first person of color on the Moon and establish sustainable lunar exploration.
SpaceX Falcon Heavy Rocket Launch Plume | International Space Station
An external high-definition camera on the International Space Station captured the launch plume of the SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket after it had ascended to Earth orbit following its liftoff on Sunday, Jan. 15, 2023, from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The space station was flying 262 miles above the Atlantic Ocean just after an orbital sunset at the time of this photograph.
Station Commander: Sergey Prokopyev of Roscosmos (Russia)
Roscosmos (Russia): Flight Engineers Anna Kikina & Dmitri Petelin
NASA: Flight Engineers Nicole Mann, Frank Rubio & Josh Cassada
JAXA (Japan): Flight Engineer Koichi Wakata
An international partnership of space agencies provides and operates the elements of the International Space Station (ISS). The principals are the space agencies of the United States, Russia, Europe, Japan, and Canada. The ISS has been the most politically complex space exploration program ever undertaken.
Billions of Celestial Objects Revealed in Milky Way Survey | NOIRLab
Astronomers have released a gargantuan survey of the galactic plane of the Milky Way. The new dataset contains a staggering 3.32 billion celestial objects—arguably the largest such catalog so far. The data for this unprecedented survey were taken with the Dark Energy Camera, built by the US Department of Energy, at the NSF’s Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile, a Program of NOIRLab.
Billions of Celestial Objects Revealed in Milky Way Survey | NOIRLab
The image above, which is brimming with stars and dark dust clouds, is a small extract—a mere pinprick— of the full Dark Energy Camera Plane Survey (DECaPS2) of the Milky Way. The new dataset contains a staggering 3.32 billion celestial objects—arguably the largest such catalog so far. The data for this unprecedented survey were taken with the US Department of Energy-fabricated Dark Energy Camera at the National Science Foundation’s Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile, a Program of NOIRLab.
Astronomers have released a gargantuan survey of the galactic plane of the Milky Way. The new dataset contains a staggering 3.32 billion celestial objects — arguably the largest such catalog so far. The data for this unprecedented survey were taken with the US Department of Energy-fabricated Dark Energy Camera at the NSF’s Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile, a Program of NOIRLab.
The survey is here reproduced in 4000-pixels resolution to be accessible on smaller devices.
Astronomers have released a gargantuan survey of the galactic plane of the Milky Way. The new dataset contains a staggering 3.32 billion celestial objects — arguably the largest such catalog so far. The data for this unprecedented survey were taken with the US Department of Energy-fabricated Dark Energy Camera at the NSF’s Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile, a Program of NOIRLab.
For reference, a low-resolution image of the DECaPS2 data is overlaid on an image showing the full sky. The callout box is a full-resolution view of a small portion of the DECaPS2 data.
Astronomers have released a gargantuan survey of the galactic plane of the Milky Way. The new dataset contains a staggering 3.32 billion celestial objects—arguably the largest such catalog so far. The data for this unprecedented survey were taken with the Dark Energy Camera, built by the US Department of Energy, at the National Science Foundation’s Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile, a Program of NOIRLab.
The Milky Way Galaxy contains hundreds of billions of stars, glimmering star-forming regions, and towering dark clouds of dust and gas. Imaging and cataloging these objects for study is a herculean task, but a newly released astronomical dataset known as the second data release of the Dark Energy Camera Plane Survey (DECaPS2) reveals a staggering number of these objects in unprecedented detail. The DECaPS2 survey, which took two years to complete and produced more than 10 terabytes of data from 21,400 individual exposures, identified approximately 3.32 billion objects—arguably the largest such catalog compiled to date. Astronomers and the public can explore the dataset here:
This unprecedented collection was captured by the Dark Energy Camera (DECam) instrument on the Víctor M. Blanco 4-meter Telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO), a Program of NSF's NOIRLab. CTIO is a constellation of international astronomical telescopes perched atop Cerro Tololo in Chile at an altitude of 2200 meters (7200 feet). CTIO’s lofty vantage point gives astronomers an unrivaled view of the southern celestial hemisphere, which allowed DECam to capture the southern Galactic plane in such detail.
DECaPS2 is a survey of the plane of the Milky Way as seen from the southern sky taken at optical and near-infrared wavelengths. The first trove of data from DECaPS was released in 2017, and with the addition of the new data release, the survey now covers 6.5% of the night sky and spans a staggering 130 degrees in length. While it might sound modest, this equates to 13,000 times the angular area of the full Moon.
The DECaPS2 dataset is available to the entire scientific community and is hosted by NOIRLab’s Astro Data Lab, which is part of the Community Science and Data Center. Interactive access to the imaging with panning/zooming inside of a web-browser is available from the Legacy Survey Viewer, the World Wide Telescope and Aladin.
Most of the stars and dust in the Milky Way are located in its disk—the bright band stretching across this image—in which the spiral arms lie. While this profusion of stars and dust makes for beautiful images, it also makes the Galactic plane challenging to observe. The dark tendrils of dust seen threading through this image absorb starlight and blot out fainter stars entirely, and the light from diffuse nebulae interferes with any attempts to measure the brightness of individual objects. Another challenge arises from the sheer number of stars, which can overlap in the image and make it difficult to disentangle individual stars from their neighbors.
Despite the challenges, astronomers delved into the Galactic plane to gain a better understanding of our Milky Way. By observing at near-infrared wavelengths, they were able to peer past much of the light-absorbing dust. The researchers also used an innovative data-processing approach, which allowed them to better predict the background behind each star. This helped to mitigate the effects of nebulae and crowded star fields on such large astronomical images, ensuring that the final catalog of processed data is more accurate.
“One of the main reasons for the success of DECaPS2 is that we simply pointed at a region with an extraordinarily high density of stars and were careful about identifying sources that appear nearly on top of each other,” said Andrew Saydjari, a graduate student at Harvard University, researcher at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian and lead author of the paper. “Doing so allowed us to produce the largest such catalog ever from a single camera, in terms of the number of objects observed.”
“When combined with images from Pan-STARRS 1, DECaPS2 completes a 360-degree panoramic view of the Milky Way's disk and additionally reaches much fainter stars,” said Edward Schlafly, a researcher at the AURA-managed Space Telescope Science Institute and a co-author of the paper describing DECaPS2 published in the Astrophysical Journal Supplement. “With this new survey, we can map the three-dimensional structure of the Milky Way's stars and dust in unprecedented detail.”
“Since my work on the Sloan Digital Sky Survey two decades ago, I have been looking for a way to make better measurements on top of complex backgrounds," said Douglas Finkbeiner, a professor at the Center for Astrophysics, co-author of the paper, and principal investigator behind the project. “This work has achieved that and more!"
“This is quite a technical feat. Imagine a group photo of over three billion people and every single individual is recognizable!” says Debra Fischer, division director of Astronomical Sciences at NSF. “Astronomers will be poring over this detailed portrait of more than three billion stars in the Milky Way for decades to come. This is a fantastic example of what partnerships across federal agencies can achieve.”
DECam was originally built to carry out the Dark Energy Survey, which was conducted by the Department of Energy and the US National Science Foundation between 2013 and 2019.
Is There Weather on the Moon? We Asked a NASA Scientist
"Is there weather on the Moon? Yes, but not the weather you’re used to. The Sun’s solar wind is a type of “space weather” that can have a big impact on the Moon due to its lack of atmosphere. It can also affect all sorts of things like satellites, electronics and communications. Better understanding how space weather interacts with the Moon will be critical as we send #Artemis astronauts to the lunar surface."
Aurora Borealis over Canada | International Space Station
This time-lapse video shows the Expedition 60 crew’s view as they travel over Canada and the Pacific Ocean on September 15, 2019 at 07:50:20 to 08:06:35 GMT. The focus of this particular video is not the Earth—it is the Aurora Borealis in the sky. The ribbon-like aurora, commonly known as the Northern Lights, snake through the Earth’s upper atmosphere with varying intensities. The frequency of aurora follows an 11-year solar activity cycle which is at its minimum in 2019/2020, but aurora still be visible from the International Space Station when it does occur. The time-lapse ends with one of the 16 sunrises visible from the ISS every day.
An international partnership of space agencies provides and operates the elements of the International Space Station (ISS). The principals are the space agencies of the United States, Russia, Europe, Japan, and Canada. The ISS has been the most politically complex space exploration program ever undertaken.
Credit: Earth Science and Remote Sensing Unit, NASA's Johnson Space Center (JSC)
.jpg)
.jpg)
.jpg)
