NASA's 10 Best Images Of 2015
The year 2015 might go down as one of the best for NASA in terms of bringing the world exciting images from across the solar system. From our neighbor Mars to the outer reaches of Pluto, here are the 10 best pictures from NASA this year.
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By all accounts, NASA has had a banner year in 2015. Between spectacular mission successes, fascinating discoveries, and equally stunning photographic accounts of its findings, the space agency stayed in the headlines, month after month, with each new announcement.
By all accounts, the best photos NASA provides this year came from the farthest away.
In the first weeks of December NASA released its latest images -- the most highly detailed shots of Pluto we've seen so far, and the best close-ups of the dwarf planet that humans may see for decades.
These latest images form a strip 50 miles wide on a world 3 billion miles away. The pictures pass from Pluto's jagged horizon about 500 miles northwest of the informally named Sputnik Planum, across the al-Idrisi Mountains, over the shoreline of Sputnik, and across its icy plains.
While the photos from Pluto have no doubt been some of the most stunning shots we've seen from the space agency this year, they are far from the only images NASA has shared.
In addition to the sophisticated snapshots from NASA's highly technical cameras mounted on spacecraft, orbiting the earth, or located back here on terra firma, we were also treated to more than 8,000 photographs of NASA's various Apollo missions, which were put out on Flickr thanks to the efforts of Kipp Teague as part of a companion website to his "Contact Light" personal retrospective on Project Apollo.
[NASA is releasing images from its Apollo archives. InformationWeek picked some of our favorites to share.]
Come along on a quick trip through the universe with our picks for NASA's best photos of 2015, and be assured that we'll no doubt have even more spectacular images of Pluto and other far flung bodies to gawk at in 2016.
(All images courtesy of NASA)
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In this highest-resolution image from NASA's New Horizons spacecraft, great blocks of Pluto's water-ice crust appear jammed together in the informally named al-Idrisi Mountains. Each week the piano-sized New Horizons spacecraft transmits data stored on its digital recorders from its July 14 flight through the Pluto system.
The International Space Station's robotic arm, Canadarm2, is visible over Earth in this November photo. On Dec. 6, Commander Scott Kelly and Flight Engineer Kjell Lindgren will operate the Canadarm2 from inside the station's cupola, using it for the rendezvous and grapple of Orbital ATK's Cygnus commercial cargo craft.
Following a successful close flyby of Saturn's moon Enceladus in October, NASA's Cassini spacecraft captured this artful composition of the icy moon with Saturn's rings beyond. Cassini's next and final close Enceladus flyby will take place on Dec. 19, when the spacecraft will measure the amount of heat coming from the moon's interior.
The Earth appears over the surface of the Moon in this vintage photo from the Apollo missions. While it may lack the iconic nature of other "earthrise" photos, it helps us to remember how small and fragile our home is, shown in sharp relief against the black expanse of the universe.
The asteroid that flew uncomfortably close (for some) by Earth over the Halloween weekend has been brought into higher relief by NASA, which published radar images of the object on Nov. 3. Asteroid 2015 TB145's passing constituted a safe flyby of Earth at a distance of 300,000 miles, according to NASA.
This photo shows Pluto and Charon in a composite of natural-color images, and highlights the contrasting appearance of the two worlds: Charon is mostly gray -- with a dark reddish polar cap. Pluto shows a wide variety of subtle color variations. The colors shown are similar, but not identical, to what would be seen with the human eye.
Scientists using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have produced new maps of Jupiter -- the first in a series of annual portraits of the solar system's outer planets. The Jupiter images have revealed a rare wave just north of the planet's equator and a unique filament-like feature in the core of the Great Red Spot not seen previously.
This March 27 view from the Mast Camera (Mastcam) on NASA's Curiosity Mars rover shows a site with a network of prominent mineral veins below a cap rock ridge on lower Mount Sharp. At this "Garden City" site, the veins have been more resistant to erosion than the surrounding host rock.
An M-class solar flare erupts from the right side of the Sun in this image from shortly before midnight on Jan. 12. The image blends two wavelengths of light -- 171 and 304 angstroms -- as captured by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory. This flare is classified as an M5.6-class flare. M-class flares are a tenth the size of the most intense flares, the X-class flares.
New Horizons scientists made this false color image of Pluto using a technique called principal component analysis in order to highlight the many subtle color differences between Pluto's distinct regions. The image data were collected by the spacecraft's Ralph/MVIC color camera on July 14 from a range of 22,000 miles.
New Horizons scientists made this false color image of Pluto using a technique called principal component analysis in order to highlight the many subtle color differences between Pluto's distinct regions. The image data were collected by the spacecraft's Ralph/MVIC color camera on July 14 from a range of 22,000 miles.
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