Earth Day, marked annually on April 22, exists primarily to inspire the global population to work together to protect our planet from environmental harm. But it’s also a chance to celebrate everything that’s special about this unique and wonderful “blue marble.” With that in mind, take a moment to lose yourself in this collection of awe-inspiring Earth images, all of them shot from space.
Here’s the first image of OSIRIS-REx as it approaches Earth with asteroid sample
This weekend will see the landing of NASA's first asteroid sample return mission, OSIRIS-REx. The spacecraft visited asteroid Bennu to study, photograph, and scoop up a sample from it, and now OSIRIS-REx is on it's way back to Earth and is almost here.
On Sunday, September 24, the spacecraft will release the capsule containing the sample, which will land in the Utah desert, where researchers will collect it for study. The spacecraft itself will continue on to study another asteroid, Apophis, and be rechristened OSIRIS-Apex.
Neptune has a dark spot of its own, and it has been imaged from Earth
While the most famous planetary spot in the solar system would have to be Jupiter's Great Red Spot, an epic storm 10,000 miles wide that has been raging for hundreds of years, other planets are known to host spots of their own as well. That includes Neptune, which had a large dark spot that was first imaged by Voyager 2 when it passed by in the 1980s.
Neptune's spot was named the Great Dark Spot, but when the Hubble Space Telescope tried to image the spot in 1994, it had disappeared. Now, a Neptune spot has been imaged from the ground for the first time, using the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope (VLT).
Hubble images our ghostly neighborhood galaxy NGC 6684
Scientists working with the Hubble Space Telescope release an image each week that the telescope has taken recently, and this week's image shows a lenticular galaxy located 44 million light-years away. Known as NGC 6684, this galaxy in the constellation of Pavo, which can be seen from the Southern Hemisphere.
Lenticular galaxies are different from spiral galaxies such as our Milky Way. Instead of distinct spiral arms reaching out from a center, lenticular galaxies are more amorphous and diffuse, but with a central disk. This type of galaxy is halfway between a spiral galaxy and an elliptical galaxy, which is smooth and almost featureless. Lenticular galaxies don't have much interstellar matter, or dust and gas floating between stars, so there isn't much material for the creation of new stars and the rate of star formation within these galaxies is low. The lack of structure in this type of galaxy is emphasized by its absence of dust lanes, making it look even more "ghostly," as Hubble scientists dub it.