View of Earth taken during ISS Expedition 42. This expedition studied how space affects immune cells, observed pollution in Earth's atmosphere, and researched super-heated materials to create advanced alloys.

Astronaut Stephen K. Robinson, STS-114 mission specialist, anchored to a foot restraint on the International Space Station’s Canadarm2, participates in the mission’s third session of extravehicular activity (EVA).

An artist's rendering of the twin Mars Cube One (MarCO) spacecraft flying over Mars with Earth in the distance. MarCO was a Mars flyby mission launched on 5 May 2018 alongside NASA's InSight Mars lander.

Space Shuttle Endeavour liftoff from Kennedy Space Center, Florida on mission STS-99. This was the last solo flight of Endeavour and also was the last mission to fly with the original Space Shuttle cockpit layout in 18 straight years.

Astronaut Bruce McCandless II, STS-41B mission specialist, reaches his maximum distance from space shuttle Challenger before returning to the spacecraft using the Manned Maneuvering Unit (MMU).

Another photo of Bruce McCandless II. Photo taken while testing out the nitrogen-propelled, hand-controlled back-pack device called the manned maneuvering unit (MMU) for the first time. STS-41B mission.

A photo of the International Space Station taken by a crewmember aboard the space shuttle orbiter Discovery in 2001.

Views of the Russian Mir space station over the Earth's horizon taken from the space shuttle Atlantis during the STS-71 mission.

Named, SuitSat-1, it was a retired Russian Orlan space suit with a radio transmitter mounted on its helmet, used as a hand-launched satellite.

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying the company’s Crew Dragon spacecraft is launched on NASA’s SpaceX Crew-4 mission to the International Space Station with NASA astronauts.

A United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket, with Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner spacecraft aboard, launches from Space Launch Complex-41 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.

An artist concept of a star being shredded by the intense gravitational pull of a mid-sized black hole. The stellar remains form a bright accretion disk around the black hole.

A computer-simulated image shows a supermassive black hole at the core of a galaxy. The black region in the center represents the black hole’s event horizon, where no light can escape the massive object’s gravitational grip.

The Soyuz rocket is launched with Expedition 70 NASA astronaut Loral O'Hara, and Roscosmos cosmonauts Oleg Kononenko and Nikolai Chub, Friday, September 15, 2023, at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.

An artist's concept illustrating a supermassive black hole around billions of times massive than our sun. Along with an accretion disk, also shown is an outflowing jet of energetic particles, believed to be powered by the black hole's spin.

A long-exposure shot of the successful launch of the Rocket Lab’s Electron rocket from Virginia’s Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport. The rocket carried three research satellites.

A hypothetical alien astronomer, if he observed the Sun from a star system in our ecliptic belt, would periodically see all the planets of the Solar System passing on the disk of our sun.

An infrared photograph taken by the James Webb Space Telescope of elephant trunks of interstellar gas and dust in the Eagle Nebula. Many stars are actively forming in the blue-gray pillars.

NGC 3351, is a barred spiral galaxy about 33 million light-years away. This is a split image: The James Webb Space Telescope’s observations appear on bottom right, and the Hubble Space Telescope’s at top left.

A photograph of Earth taken by Voyager 1. Seen from about 6 billion kilometers, Earth appears as a tiny dot within deep space: the blueish-white speck almost halfway up the rightmost band of light