Space

Just another webpage floating in space…

[nasa]

3, 2, 1 – liftoff!

The Artemis II Moon rocket lifted off from our Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 6:35 p.m. EDT on April 1, 2026. Our live launch day coverage continues on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tf_UjBMIzNo

Stick with us for more Artemis II content including live broadcasts for lunar flyby and splashdown, daily news conferences, and 24/7 streams providing views from the Orion spacecraft and from NASA Kennedy.

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@ Matthew Matt Ginnow

[nasa]

That's us, together.

While we're looking up at the Artemis II astronauts journeying to the Moon, they're looking back home at us. 

In this image, Earth peeks through the capsule window, reminding us that a view like this relies on the ingenuity and hard work of countless people back home.

In the second image, we see our home planet as a whole, lit up in spectacular blues and browns. A green aurora even lights up the atmosphere.

Follow the Artemis II astronauts on their journey to the Moon:

[matthewginnow]

@ Matthew Matt Ginnow

[matthewginnow]

Let's take a break together and reflect

[matthewginnow]

Tour the Crab Nebula

[nasa]

Send Your Name Around the Moon

Your name goes here. The Artemis II mission is launching in early 2026. You can sign up now to have your name aboard the Orion spacecraft when it flies around the Moon. All of the names will be recorded onto a memory card that will be stowed inside of the capsule. You can submit as many names as you want — including your friends or pets!

Don’t forget to download your boarding pass: go.nasa.gov/artemisnames

[matthewginnow]

Matthew Ginnow

[nasa]

Do you love the color of the—uh, well, does this even count as the sky anymore?

Astronaut Don Pettit took this photo from space in January 2025, as the Sun began to rise over a cloudy Pacific Ocean. This long-exposure image shows off the wide band of the Milky Way, our home galaxy, above the aurora and airglow that shine closer to Earth's horizon.

Astronaut Don Pettit has been to space four times: most recently, he spent 220 days on the International Space Station, returning to Earth in April 2025. Pettit grew space plants, printed 3D metal parts, and studied human health during his time in orbit. When he wasn't working on more formal studies, though, he found plenty of time for what he calls the "science of opportunity:" exploring and experimenting with his surroundings through a combination of science and art.

Pettit shares his experience with the art side of his time in space on our astrophotography episode of “Houston, We Have a Podcast” alongside astronaut Matt Dominick. Give it a listen here or on your favorite podcast app.

[matthewginnow]

Matthew Ginnow

[nasa]

This cosmic spiral is coming out of its shell!

What you’re looking at here is Apep, a trio of stars with distinct shells of dust swirling around them. This image was taken by our James Webb Space Telescope, and is the crispest view we have of the star system to date.

Named for the Egyptian god of chaos, the stars in this system are anything but peaceful and tranquil. Two of the three stars are part of a rare class of massive, evolved, luminous stars. That pair creates the shells as they orbit each other, flinging out dust at up to 2,000 miles per second. The third star is a massive supergiant with a much wider orbit, and the shock of its solar wind slices holes in these shells.

Before now, scientists had only been able to see one shell around Apep, despite hypothesizing the presence of more. But with the help of Webb’s keen eye, we have confirmed that Apep is layered like a cosmic onion, with four distinct shells now visible.

Learn more about Apep and see an animated visualization of the shells here.

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space!

[matthewginnow]

Matthew Ginnow

[nasa]

Milky Way Anatomy

If we could see our galaxy, the Milky Way, from the outside, it would look like an enormous, bedazzled pinwheel. Vast sprays of stars form spiral arms that curl outward from a bright center that bulges like the yolk in a fried egg. Dark, dusty tendrils darken some regions, while glowing pink gas clouds light up others.

We have a pretty good idea of the Milky Way’s overall structure, but since we’re nestled inside it, fine details are hard to see. Those clouds of gas and dust strewn throughout interstellar space block our view, especially of the far side of the galaxy.  Astronomers have used observations from different telescopes to piece together our galaxy's anatomy. Let's scrub up and dive in!

An artist’s concept of our Milky Way galaxy’s central bulge.

At the heart of our galaxy, an enormous swarm of about 10 billion mostly old stars crowd into a slightly peanut-shaped region around 10,000 light-years across called the bulge. The innermost stars dance around an invisible object. By measuring the stars’ orbits, scientists have calculated that the central object must be as hefty as about 4 million Suns.

This unseen behemoth is a monster black hole called Sagittarius A* (A* is pronounced “A-star”). Its gravity is so powerful that if you came within 7 million miles (12 million kilometers) or so –– less than a tenth of Earth’s distance from the Sun –– you’d never be able to escape its grip, no matter how hard you tried! But don’t worry, Sagittarius A* is a pretty friendly giant; it’s largely dormant, releasing only faint flickers of X-rays and radio waves.

An artist’s concept of our Milky Way galaxy’s disk.

The disk, which is home to the bulk of the Milky Way’s stars, extends out from the bulge like the brim of a sombrero. It’s around 100,000 light-years wide and divided into two parts. The thin disk is about 1,000 light-years from top to bottom, and the thick disk (which isn’t as densely populated by stars) extends above and below it for another few thousand light-years. So, the thick disk is like a bagel, and the thin disk is like a generous layer of cream cheese spread inside it.

The thin disk hosts our galaxy’s spiral arms, which look like they spin around the Milky Way like bicycle spokes, although they actually work more like galactic traffic jams. We live along one of these dense areas in an arm called the Orion Spur. All of the Milky Way’s arms extend outward from the bar –– a rotating structure of stars in the middle of the galaxy that’s about 16,000 light-years long.

The edge of a nearby stellar nursery called NGC 3324, found at the northwest corner of the Carina Nebula, forms the “mountains” and “valleys” spanning this image captured by the James Webb Space Telescope.

The spaces between stars in the disk aren’t quite empty –– they’re home to the interstellar medium, which is made of dust and gas. Dark, smoky ribbons of dust wind through the starlight, clumping up here and there to form clouds of molecules. To some astronomers, the dust is a nuisance that blocks things they’d like to study. But for others, the dust is the target –– interstellar dust is both the leftover crumbs from stars long dead and raw material from which new stars and planets may form.

An artist’s concept of our Milky Way galaxy’s stellar halo.

A sparse smattering of incredibly old, faint stars lives in a football-shaped “halo” that’s about 300,000 light-years across, encasing the disk and bulge. Stars there are tiny, which means they burn through their nuclear fuel so slowly they can live 12 billion years or even longer! Many of them formed early in the universe’s history, before many generations of stars enriched the galaxy with heavier elements than hydrogen and helium.

This Hubble Space Telescope image shows one of the Milky Way's many globular clusters. Known as NGC 6388, the cluster is more than 10 billion years old.

The stellar halo is also home to at least 150 globular clusters –– huge, spherical collections of ancient stars bound to each other by their mutual gravity. These groups of tens of thousands or even millions of stars are the ultimate squad goals. They’re so tightly packed together, sometimes just a fraction of a light-year apart, that from Earth they look like glittery disco balls. And they’re practically inseparable, sticking together for billions of years.

This artist’s concept visualizes gamma-ray bubbles discovered by NASA’s Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope. From end to end, the bubbles extend 50,000 light-years, or roughly half of the Milky Way’s diameter. Hints of the bubbles’ edges were first observed in X-rays (blue) by ROSAT, a Germany-led mission operating in the 1990s. The gamma rays mapped by Fermi (magenta) extend much farther from the galaxy’s plane.

Vast “bubbles” of gamma rays, each about 25,000 light-years long, stretch into the stellar halo from the center of the galaxy. Scientists found them by surprise in data from NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope. The mysterious structure may be only a few million years old, perhaps leftover from a massive burst of star formation or an eruption from Sagittarius A*.

An artist’s concept of our Milky Way galaxy’s dark matter halo.

An even larger halo of dark matter (about a million light-years across) cocoons the stellar halo. This mystery material has mass, so its gravity pulls on things we can see. But it isn’t visible itself, and no one knows exactly what it’s made of. This strange stuff makes up about 90 percent of our galaxy’s mass.

This illustration, taken from a computer simulation, visualizes the Milky Way's dark matter halo (as well as several surrounding dark matter clumps) in blue.

Scientists know it’s there because if it weren’t, stars would orbit much faster near the galaxy’s center than on the outskirts. But for the most part, orbital speeds are pretty constant regardless of distance from the center. Stars toward the edge of the disk whirl around so quickly that they should be flung off into space if there weren’t something keeping them anchored to the Milky Way. Dark matter holds our galaxy together.

This collage shows the Milky Way in 10 different wavelengths of light, from radio waves to gamma rays. By studying our galaxy in different types of light, astronomers can learn far more than they could otherwise.

While astronomers have mapped much of our galaxy’s bulge, disk, and stellar and dark matter halos, key details about its structure and hidden components remain unknown. NASA is tackling the Milky Way’s mysteries with a fleet of space telescopes designed to explore the universe in different ways.

For example, our upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will peer through dust with a large field of view to map stars, dust and gas clouds on the far side of the galaxy, revealing hidden structures, spiral arms, and stellar nurseries. Our picture of our home galaxy will soon be clearer than ever before!

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space!

[matthewginnow]

Matthew Ginnow

[nasa]

Interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS is only the third object we've ever seen passing through our solar system from elsewhere in the galaxy. 3I/ATLAS doesn't pose a threat to Earth, and the closest it'll get to our home planet (on Dec. 19) is about 170 million miles—nearly twice the distance between Earth and the Sun.

That doesn't mean our scientists aren't keeping a close eye on it, though! Interstellar objects like 3I/ATLAS give us a unique opportunity to learn more about what solar systems beyond ours are made of, so NASA spacecraft, satellites, and even our Mars rovers have been watching the comet as it arcs through our neighborhood.

This image of 3I/ATLAS was taken by our Hubble Space Telescope on Nov. 30, when the comet was about 178 million miles from Earth. Follow the latest updates on our 3I/ATLAS blog.

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space!

[matthewginnow]

Matthew Ginnow

[nasa]

Our Next Big Eye on the Cosmos is Complete!

Our Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is now fully assembled! Once it passes final tests, it will move to our Kennedy Space Center in Florida for launch preparations this summer. Roman is slated to launch by May 2027, but the team is on track for launch as early as fall 2026.

NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope in the largest clean room at the agency’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

The observatory is named after Dr. Nancy Grace Roman, NASA’s first chief astronomer who made cosmic vistas readily accessible to all by paving the way for telescopes based in space. The Roman Space Telescope will build on her legacy by sending back a flood of incredible celestial images and data.

A SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket will send the observatory to its final destination a million miles from Earth. Observing from way out in space will make Roman very sensitive to infrared light — light with a longer wavelength than our eyes can see — from far across the cosmos. Pairing its crisp infrared vision with a sweeping view of space will allow astronomers to explore all kinds of cosmic topics, from dark matter and dark energy to distant worlds and solitary black holes, and conduct research that would take hundreds of years using other telescopes.

Roman is equipped with two instruments: the Wide Field Instrument and the Coronagraph Instrument technology demonstration.

The Wide Field Instrument is a 288-megapixel camera that will unveil the cosmos all the way from our solar system to near the edge of the observable universe. Using this instrument, each Roman image will capture a patch of the sky bigger than the apparent size of a full moon.

That will help the mission gather data hundreds of times faster than our Hubble Space Telescope, adding up to 20,000 terabytes (20 petabytes) over the course of its five-year primary mission. If all that data were printed as text and the pages were placed on top of each other, the stack would extend way past the Moon!

This image compares Roman’s field of view (the large outer outline) with Hubble’s (the small, square inset). Roman will capture at least 100 times more area in each image with crisp resolution that rivals Hubble’s, enabling astronomers to explore the universe in exciting new ways.

The Coronagraph will demonstrate new technologies for directly imaging planets around other stars. It will block the glare from distant stars and make it easier for scientists to see the faint light from planets in orbit around them. The Coronagraph aims to photograph worlds and dusty disks around nearby stars in visible light to help us see giant worlds that are older, colder, and in closer orbits than the hot, young super-Jupiters direct imaging has mainly revealed so far.

The gravity of intervening galaxy clusters and dark matter can lens the light from farther objects, warping their appearance as shown in this animated artist’s concept. By studying the distorted light with the Roman Space Telescope, astronomers can study elusive dark matter, which can only be measured indirectly through its gravitational effects on visible matter.

Using the Wide Field Instrument, Roman will conduct three major surveys which will account for 75% of the primary mission. The High-Latitude Wide-Area Survey will unveil more than a billion galaxies strewn across a wide swath of space and time. Astronomers will trace the evolution of the universe to probe dark matter — invisible matter detectable only by how its gravity affects things we can see — and see how galaxies and galaxy groups formed.

The High-Latitude Time-Domain Survey will watch for things that go bump in the universe by observing the same region of the cosmos repeatedly. Stitching these observations together to create movies will allow scientists to study how celestial objects and phenomena change over time periods of days to years. That will help astronomers study dark energy — the mysterious cosmic pressure thought to accelerate the universe’s expansion — and could even uncover entirely new phenomena that we’ve never seen before.

A simulated image of Roman’s observations toward the center of our galaxy, spanning much less than 1 percent of the total area of Roman’s Galactic Bulge Time-Domain Survey.

Roman’s Galactic Bulge Time-Domain Survey will look inward to provide one of the deepest views ever of the heart of our Milky Way galaxy. Astronomers will watch hundreds of millions of stars in search of microlensing signals — gravitational boosts of a background star’s light caused by the gravity of an intervening object. While astronomers have mainly discovered star-hugging worlds, Roman’s microlensing observations can find planets in the habitable zone of their star and farther out, including worlds like every planet in our solar system except Mercury. Microlensing will also reveal rogue planets — worlds that roam the galaxy untethered to a star — and small, isolated black holes. The same dataset will reveal 100,000 worlds that transit, or pass in front of, their host stars.

This infographic previews some of the discoveries scientists anticipate from NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope’s five-year primary mission. Scientists expect it to see an incredible number of new objects, including stars, galaxies, black holes and planets outside our solar system, known as exoplanets.

Roman will collect all of that data in less than four years! The remaining 25% of Roman’s five-year primary mission will be dedicated to other groundbreaking observations, which mostly haven’t been determined yet. With Roman’s unprecedented view of the universe, who knows what other exciting discoveries await?

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space!

[matthewginnow]

Matthew Ginnow

[matthewginnow]

Live Video from the International Space Station (Official NASA Stream)

[matthewginnow]

Let's take a break together and reflect

[nasa]

This week, get caught in the spider’s web.

Check out the incredibly detailed view our Hubble Space Telescope captured of the Tarantula Nebula! This cosmic spider resides in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a dwarf galaxy located about 160,000 light-years away in the constellations Dorado and Mensa. The Tarantula Nebula is the largest and brightest star-forming region, not just in the Large Magellanic Cloud, but in the entire group of nearby galaxies to which the Milky Way belongs. It's also home to the most massive stars known, some roughly 200 times as massive as our Sun.

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space!

[matthewginnow]

Matt Ginnow

Matthew Ginnow

[nasa]

Send Your Name Around the Moon

Your name goes here. The Artemis II mission is launching in early 2026. You can sign up now to have your name aboard the Orion spacecraft when it flies around the Moon. All of the names will be recorded onto a memory card that will be stowed inside of the capsule. You can submit as many names as you want — including your friends or pets!

Don’t forget to download your boarding pass: go.nasa.gov/artemisnames

[matthewginnow]

Matt Ginnow

Matthew Ginnow

[nasa]

Is Your Name Going to Space?

There's still time to add your name to our Artemis II mission, which will lift off in 2026 for a 10-day journey around the Moon and back. Artemis II will carry four astronauts — three from NASA and one from the Canadian Space Agency — who will test our Artemis rocket and spacecraft before future missions land on the Moon's surface.

Over 900,000 people have signed up so far to send their name on Artemis II. Make sure you're one of them!

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space!

[matthewginnow]

Matt Ginnow

Matthew Ginnow

[nasa]

This cosmic spiral is coming out of its shell!

What you’re looking at here is Apep, a trio of stars with distinct shells of dust swirling around them. This image was taken by our James Webb Space Telescope, and is the crispest view we have of the star system to date.

Named for the Egyptian god of chaos, the stars in this system are anything but peaceful and tranquil. Two of the three stars are part of a rare class of massive, evolved, luminous stars. That pair creates the shells as they orbit each other, flinging out dust at up to 2,000 miles per second. The third star is a massive supergiant with a much wider orbit, and the shock of its solar wind slices holes in these shells.

Before now, scientists had only been able to see one shell around Apep, despite hypothesizing the presence of more. But with the help of Webb’s keen eye, we have confirmed that Apep is layered like a cosmic onion, with four distinct shells now visible.

Learn more about Apep and see an animated visualization of the shells here.

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space!

[matthewginnow]

Matt Ginnow

Matthew Ginnow

[nasa]

Milky Way Anatomy

If we could see our galaxy, the Milky Way, from the outside, it would look like an enormous, bedazzled pinwheel. Vast sprays of stars form spiral arms that curl outward from a bright center that bulges like the yolk in a fried egg. Dark, dusty tendrils darken some regions, while glowing pink gas clouds light up others.

We have a pretty good idea of the Milky Way’s overall structure, but since we’re nestled inside it, fine details are hard to see. Those clouds of gas and dust strewn throughout interstellar space block our view, especially of the far side of the galaxy.  Astronomers have used observations from different telescopes to piece together our galaxy's anatomy. Let's scrub up and dive in!

An artist’s concept of our Milky Way galaxy’s central bulge.

At the heart of our galaxy, an enormous swarm of about 10 billion mostly old stars crowd into a slightly peanut-shaped region around 10,000 light-years across called the bulge. The innermost stars dance around an invisible object. By measuring the stars’ orbits, scientists have calculated that the central object must be as hefty as about 4 million Suns.

This unseen behemoth is a monster black hole called Sagittarius A* (A* is pronounced “A-star”). Its gravity is so powerful that if you came within 7 million miles (12 million kilometers) or so –– less than a tenth of Earth’s distance from the Sun –– you’d never be able to escape its grip, no matter how hard you tried! But don’t worry, Sagittarius A* is a pretty friendly giant; it’s largely dormant, releasing only faint flickers of X-rays and radio waves.

An artist’s concept of our Milky Way galaxy’s disk.

The disk, which is home to the bulk of the Milky Way’s stars, extends out from the bulge like the brim of a sombrero. It’s around 100,000 light-years wide and divided into two parts. The thin disk is about 1,000 light-years from top to bottom, and the thick disk (which isn’t as densely populated by stars) extends above and below it for another few thousand light-years. So, the thick disk is like a bagel, and the thin disk is like a generous layer of cream cheese spread inside it.

The thin disk hosts our galaxy’s spiral arms, which look like they spin around the Milky Way like bicycle spokes, although they actually work more like galactic traffic jams. We live along one of these dense areas in an arm called the Orion Spur. All of the Milky Way’s arms extend outward from the bar –– a rotating structure of stars in the middle of the galaxy that’s about 16,000 light-years long.

The edge of a nearby stellar nursery called NGC 3324, found at the northwest corner of the Carina Nebula, forms the “mountains” and “valleys” spanning this image captured by the James Webb Space Telescope.

The spaces between stars in the disk aren’t quite empty –– they’re home to the interstellar medium, which is made of dust and gas. Dark, smoky ribbons of dust wind through the starlight, clumping up here and there to form clouds of molecules. To some astronomers, the dust is a nuisance that blocks things they’d like to study. But for others, the dust is the target –– interstellar dust is both the leftover crumbs from stars long dead and raw material from which new stars and planets may form.

An artist’s concept of our Milky Way galaxy’s stellar halo.

A sparse smattering of incredibly old, faint stars lives in a football-shaped “halo” that’s about 300,000 light-years across, encasing the disk and bulge. Stars there are tiny, which means they burn through their nuclear fuel so slowly they can live 12 billion years or even longer! Many of them formed early in the universe’s history, before many generations of stars enriched the galaxy with heavier elements than hydrogen and helium.

This Hubble Space Telescope image shows one of the Milky Way's many globular clusters. Known as NGC 6388, the cluster is more than 10 billion years old.

The stellar halo is also home to at least 150 globular clusters –– huge, spherical collections of ancient stars bound to each other by their mutual gravity. These groups of tens of thousands or even millions of stars are the ultimate squad goals. They’re so tightly packed together, sometimes just a fraction of a light-year apart, that from Earth they look like glittery disco balls. And they’re practically inseparable, sticking together for billions of years.

This artist’s concept visualizes gamma-ray bubbles discovered by NASA’s Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope. From end to end, the bubbles extend 50,000 light-years, or roughly half of the Milky Way’s diameter. Hints of the bubbles’ edges were first observed in X-rays (blue) by ROSAT, a Germany-led mission operating in the 1990s. The gamma rays mapped by Fermi (magenta) extend much farther from the galaxy’s plane.

Vast “bubbles” of gamma rays, each about 25,000 light-years long, stretch into the stellar halo from the center of the galaxy. Scientists found them by surprise in data from NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope. The mysterious structure may be only a few million years old, perhaps leftover from a massive burst of star formation or an eruption from Sagittarius A*.

An artist’s concept of our Milky Way galaxy’s dark matter halo.

An even larger halo of dark matter (about a million light-years across) cocoons the stellar halo. This mystery material has mass, so its gravity pulls on things we can see. But it isn’t visible itself, and no one knows exactly what it’s made of. This strange stuff makes up about 90 percent of our galaxy’s mass.

This illustration, taken from a computer simulation, visualizes the Milky Way's dark matter halo (as well as several surrounding dark matter clumps) in blue.

Scientists know it’s there because if it weren’t, stars would orbit much faster near the galaxy’s center than on the outskirts. But for the most part, orbital speeds are pretty constant regardless of distance from the center. Stars toward the edge of the disk whirl around so quickly that they should be flung off into space if there weren’t something keeping them anchored to the Milky Way. Dark matter holds our galaxy together.

This collage shows the Milky Way in 10 different wavelengths of light, from radio waves to gamma rays. By studying our galaxy in different types of light, astronomers can learn far more than they could otherwise.

While astronomers have mapped much of our galaxy’s bulge, disk, and stellar and dark matter halos, key details about its structure and hidden components remain unknown. NASA is tackling the Milky Way’s mysteries with a fleet of space telescopes designed to explore the universe in different ways.

For example, our upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will peer through dust with a large field of view to map stars, dust and gas clouds on the far side of the galaxy, revealing hidden structures, spiral arms, and stellar nurseries. Our picture of our home galaxy will soon be clearer than ever before!

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space!

[matthewginnow]

Matt Ginnow

Matthew Ginnow