The Global Hawk is a robotic plane that can fly autonomously to altitudes above 60,000 feet -- twice as high as a commercial airliner -- and as far as 11,000 nautical miles -- half the circumference of Earth. Operators pre-program a flight path, and then the plane flies itself for as long as 30 hours, staying in contact through satellite and line-of-site communications to the ground control station at NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center in California's Mojave Desert. Image Credit: NASA/Ton...
Continue reading ...

In preparation for its last planned mission to the International Space Station, shuttle Discovery was lowered onto its external fuel tank and solid rocket boosters in High Bay 3 of the Vehicle Assembly Building at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The lift and mate operation began Sept. 9 and wrapped up early Sept. 10. On Sept. 21, 2010, Discovery completed its last planned trip to the launch pad at 1:49 a.m., leaving the Vehicle Assembly Building at about 7:23 p.m. on the slow, 3.4-mil...
Continue reading ...

In the cold vacuum of space, radiation from massive stars carves away at cold molecular clouds, creating bizarre, fantasy-like structures. These pillars of cold hydrogen and dust, imaged by the Hubble Space Telescope, are located in the Carina Nebula. Violent stellar winds and powerful radiation from massive stars sculpt the surrounding nebula. This image of dust pillars in the Carina Nebula is a composite of 2005 observations taken of the region in hydrogen light (light emitted by hydrogen a...
Continue reading ...