Alan B. Shepard Jr. 1923 1998
24.07.1998

On another Friday (May 5, 1961), at the dawn of the space age, NASA controllers "lit the candle" and sent Alan B. Shepard Jr. arcing into space atop a Redstone rocket. The picture shows...

Mercury And The Sun
19.11.1999

Just days before the peak of the Leonid meteor shower, skywatchers were offered another astronomical treat as planet Mercury crossed the face of the Sun on November 15. Viewed from planet Earth, a transit of Mercury is not all that rare. The last occurred in 1993 and the next will happen in 2003.

3D Mercury Transit
20.05.2016

On May 9, innermost planet Mercury crossed IN FRONT of the Sun. Though pictures project the event in only two dimensions, a remarkable three dimensional perspective on the transit is possible by free viewing this stereo pair.

Mercury's Surface in Exaggerated Color
16.06.2011

The robotic MESSENGER spacecraft recently completed over 100 orbits of Mercury. Messenger's cameras have recorded detailed pictures utilizing eight different colors across visible and near infrared light, exploring the surface composition and looking for clues to the history and evolution of the solar system's innermost planet.

Ganymede Enhanced
20.09.2009

What does the largest moon in the Solar System look like? Ganymede, larger than even Mercury and Pluto, has a surface speckled with bright young craters overlying a mixture of older, darker, more cratered terrain laced with grooves and ridges.

Callisto Enhanced
12.05.1998

Callisto is half rock and half ice. This moon of Jupiter is approximately the size of the planet Mercury, making it the third largest moon in the Solar System, after Ganymede and Titan. Callisto...

Northern Mercury
1.12.2012

Innermost planet Mercury would probably not be a good location for an interplanetary winter olympics. But new results based on data from the Mercury orbiting MESSENGER spacecraft indicate that it does have substantial water ice in permanently shadowed regions within craters near its north pole.

Live: Watching for Venus to Cross the Sun
5.06.2012

Today Venus moves in front of the Sun. One way to follow this rare event is to actively reload the above live image of the Sun during the right time interval and look for an unusual circular dark dot. The smaller sprawling dark areas are sunspots. The circular dot is the planet Venus.

Ganymede: The Largest Moon in the Solar System
20.06.2000

If Ganymede orbited the Sun, it would be considered a planet. The reason is that Jupiter's moon Ganymede is not only the largest moon in the Solar System, it is larger than planets Mercury and Pluto.

Ganymede Mosaic
4.03.1999

Ganymede, one of the four Galilean moons of Jupiter, is the largest moon in the Solar System. With a diameter of 5,260 kilometers it is even larger than planets Mercury and Pluto and just over three quarters the size of Mars. Ganymede is locked in synchronous rotation with Jupiter.