Notícias NASA

Blizzards in the Western United States

A series of heavy winter storms pummeled parts of the western United States between December 24, 2003, and January 3, 2004, blanketing the region with deep snow. Salt Lake City, Utah, reported more than six feet of snow, according to…

Supernova Survivor: First Supernova Companion Star Found

An international team of astronomers has, for the first time, observed a stellar “survivor” to emerge from a double star system involving an exploded supernova. Supernovae are some of the most significant sources of chemical elements in the universe, and…

Ancient Citadel of Bam, Iran

This one-meter resolution satellite image of Bam, Iran was taken by Digital Globe’s IKONOS satellite on Dec. 27, 2003, just one day after a catastrophic earthquake struck the historic city. The image shows widespread destruction as a result of the…

Too Fast, Too Furious: A Galaxy’s Fatal Plunge

Trailing 200,000-light-year-long streamers of seething gas, a galaxy that was once like our Milky Way is being shredded as it plunges at 4.5 million miles per hour through the heart of a distant cluster of galaxies. In this unusually violent…

6 min read

Auroras: Dancing in the Night

Astronaut Don Pettit describes the aurora he photographed while aboard the International Space Station.

5 min read

Photographs of Auroras from Space

If Iris, the goddess of the rainbow, had a sister she would be the goddess of Aurora. Glowing green ripples form arcs that constantly transform their shape into new glowing diaphanous forms. There is nothing static about auroras. They are…

Sunny Mid-Atlantic

New Year’s Eve, 2003 was exceptionally warm and sunny over the Mid-Atlantic states. This image from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) aboard NASA’s Aqua satellite shows substantial portions of the states of Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, Virginia,…

Lake Amadeus

Like frantic brushstrokes, fire scars cover the arid landscape near Lake Amadeus(upper right) in Australia’s Northern Territory. Lake Amadeus is rich in saltsthat have been leached out of the underlying sediments. When dry, its lake bed istransformed into a glistening…

Hindu Kush

Once used by Alexander the Great in his effort to conquer the known world, the high-altitude passes of the Hindu Kush remain important trade and travel routes. Glaciers and heavy snowfall are ever-present features of these mountains, which rise to…

Global Chlorophyll

Launched on August 1, 1997, the Sea-viewing Wide Field-of-View Sensor (SeaWiFS) began collecting global data operationally in mid-September of that year and has been flawlessly gathering observations of ocean color for the past six years. While most of the light…

Images from Hubble’s ACS Tell a Tale of Two Record-Breaking Galaxy Clusters

Looking back in time nearly 9 billion years, an international team of astronomers found mature galaxies in a young universe. The galaxies are members of a cluster of galaxies that existed when the universe was only 5 billion years old,…

6 min read

Panama: Isthmus that Changed the World

Twenty million years ago ocean covered the area where Panama is today. There was a gap between the continents of North and South America through which the waters of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans flowed freely. Beneath the surface, two…

4 min read

Platte River, Nebraska

Shallow channels of water weave around sandy islands along the 310-mile course of the Platte River through Nebraska. The river carries snowmelt from the Rocky Mountains in Colorado and Wyoming to the Missouri River, which drains into the Mississippi. Early…

3 min read