Chartered by Stephen W. Hawking at @UCF to help the public be more involved in space through research and education, because space is our future.
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ALT Plot of asteroid Strenua's outline rebuilt from the moment it passed in front of a star. A black dotted oval, about twice as wide as it is tall, sits on a grid marked in kilometers, wrapped in faint orange curves showing other possible outlines. Colored horizontal lines mark the four stations that saw the star vanish, with dots where it blinked out and came back. Gray lines above and below mark stations that saw no change.
ALT Close up of a metal wheel built for the Moon. A woven mesh of fine wire is crossed by flat metal strips, each fastened with round rivets, curving around the tread. This replica of the Apollo lunar rover wheel flexes without air and was tested in NASA Glenn's simulated lunar soil lab.
ALT A spacewalker in a white suit, numbered 15, works beside two large rolled-up solar arrays, gold and striped like giant scrolls, mounted on the space station's truss, against the black of space. An existing orange solar panel stretches across the upper left.
ALT A Falcon 9 rocket rises off its Cape Canaveral launch pad before dawn on a bright column of engine flame, climbing between tall lightning towers and the launch tower. Billowing exhaust clouds glow orange at the lower left, and the whole scene is lit gold against a dark sky.
ALT Diagram of the inner Solar System seen from above, with the Sun at center and colored circles for the orbits of Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, and Jupiter. A dark, stretched oval labeled Cape Cod Bay Bolide loops from inside Earth's orbit out toward Jupiter's, wrapped in a faint purple haze of possible orbits, over pale outlines of 57 known meteorite orbits.
ALT Color close-up of Phobos, the larger moon of Mars: a lumpy, potato-shaped gray and reddish body covered in craters and long parallel grooves, with the large crater Stickney at lower right, against black space.
ALT NASA astronaut and Expedition 75 flight engineer Anil Menon smiles for a portrait while conducting spacesuit maintenance inside the International Space Station's Quest airlock.
ALT Three black and white close-ups of asteroid Bennu's surface. The large left image shows a 180 meter wide area of jumbled rocks, angular boulders, and gravel, with two outlined boxes. The right panels zoom in on a boulder about 15 meters across and on a smooth pond of fine regolith with few large rocks.
ALT Black-and-white photo on the Moon. An Apollo 12 astronaut in a white spacesuit stands beside the robotic Surveyor III lander, its spindly frame and tilted solar panel in the foreground. The Apollo 12 lunar module sits on the horizon behind them against a black sky.
ALT The Griffin-1 lunar lander, wrapped in silver thermal blanketing with four splayed landing legs, sits on a black test stand inside a white acoustic test chamber at NASA JPL, surrounded by microphones on tall stands as a technician in a white clean-room suit works nearby.
ALT Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin, in a white spacesuit with a gold visor, walks across gray lunar soil beside a gold foil wrapped landing leg and footpad of the lunar module Eagle. Bootprints cover the dark foreground under a black sky.
ALT Close-up of asteroid Ryugu's gray, boulder-strewn surface, taken by Hayabusa2's Optical Navigation Camera from about 6 kilometers away on July 20, 2018. Credit JAXA, University of Tokyo and collaborators (CC BY 4.0).