ESA Rosetta mission: Comet 67/P image captured by Philae Lander ROLIS instrument

The image shows comet 67P/CG acquired by the ROLIS instrument on the Philae lander during descent on Nov 12, 2014 14:38:41 UT from a distance of approximately 3 km from the surface. 

The landing site is imaged with a resolution of about 3m per pixel.

The ROLIS instrument is a down-looking imager that acquires images during the descent and doubles as a multispectral close-up camera after the landing.

The aim of the ROLIS experiment is to study the texture and microstructure of the comet's surface.

ROLIS (ROsetta Lander Imaging System) is a descent and close-up camera on the Philae Lander. It has been developed by the DLR Institute of Planetary Research, Berlin.

The lander separated from the orbiter at 09:03 GMT (10:03 CET) and touched down on Comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko seven hours later.

Intense Solar Eruption Captured by NASA SDO Spacecraft - Video

A huge tendril of super-hot plasma that had been creeping across the face of the sun erupted Tuesday (Sept. 2) in a striking solar storm that may send a wave of charged particles in Earth's direction.

Video of the solar eruption captured by NASA's sun-watching Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) shows a cloud of solar plasma being hurled from the sun's surface during the rippling blast.

Debris from the solar explosion could be traveling in the direction of Earth, according to Spaceweather.com, which tracks stargazing and space weather events.

Further observations should confirm whether the eruption was actually an Earth-directed coronal mass ejection, or CME.

CMEs occur when the sun's magnetic field lines become so warped that they snap like rubber bands then reconnect at other points.

These breaks can leave gaps where the sun's plasma spews into space.

CMEs can occasionally spark geomagnetic storms when they collide with Earth.

These disturbances can interfere with electronics, cause radio blackouts and produce stunning auroras.

In the days before the eruption, the filament of dark plasma looked like a long shadow on the sun that stretched some 372,823 miles (600,000 kilometers), that's more than three times the diameter of Jupiter, the largest planet in the solar system.

Amateur astrophotographers from around the world had been sending Spaceweather.com amazing amazing images of the filament over the past few days.

Large Magellanic Cloud‎'s clockwork motion captured in nearby galaxy - Video

This photo illustration shows Hubble measurements of the rotation of the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), the nearest visible galaxy to our Milky Way. 

The LMC appears in the Southern Hemisphere's night sky. In this photo illustration, the image contrast in a ground-based photo was enhanced to highlight the LMC’s faint outer regions, which are not visible to the naked eye. 

To illustrate the LMC's large apparent size on the sky, an image of the full moon is shown at bottom right. A horizon has been added for perspective. 

The arrows represent the highest-quality Hubble measurements of the motion of the LMC's stars to show how this galaxy rotates. 

Each arrow reveals the predicted motion over the next 7 million years. The motion of each star measured by Hubble over a few years’ time is a million times smaller than the length of each arrow. 

The LMC completes a rotation every 250 million years. 

Credit: NASA, ESA, A. Feild and Z. Levay (STScI), Y. Beletsky (Las Campanas Observatory), and R. van der Marel (STScI)

Using the NASA /ESA Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers have for the first time precisely measured the rotation rate of a galaxy based on the clock-like movement of its stars.

According to their analysis, the central part of the neighboring galaxy, called the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), completes a rotation every 250 million years.

Coincidentally, it takes our Sun the same amount of time to complete a rotation around the center of our Milky Way galaxy.

Roeland van der Marel

The Hubble team, composed of Roeland van der Marel of the Space Telescope Science Institute (STSI) in Baltimore, Md., and Nitya Kallivayalil of the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, Va., used Hubble to measure the average motion of hundreds of individual stars in the LMC, located 170,000 light-years away.

Hubble recorded the stars' slight movements over a seven-year period.

Disk-shaped spiral galaxies, like the Milky Way and the LMC, generally rotate like a carousel.

Hubble's precision tracking offers a new way to determine a galaxy's rotation by the "sideways" proper motion of its stars, as seen in the plane of sky.

Astronomers have long measured the sideways motions of nearby celestial objects, but this is the first time that the precision has become sufficient to see another distant galaxy rotate.

For the past century astronomers have calculated galaxy rotation rates by observing a slight shift in the spectrum, called the Doppler effect, of its starlight.

On one side of a galaxy's spinning stellar disk, the stars swinging in the direction of Earth will show a spectral blueshift (the compression of light waves due to motion toward the observer).

Stars swinging away from Earth on the opposite side of a galaxy will show a spectral redshift (the stretching of light to redder wavelengths due to motion away from the observer).

The newly measured Hubble sideways motions and the Doppler motions measured previously each provide complementary information about the LMC's rotation rate. 

By combining the results, the Hubble team for the first time obtained a fully three-dimensional view of stellar motions in another galaxy.

This animation illustrates the rotation rate of the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC). 

Hubble Space Telescope observations have determined that the central part of the LMC completes a rotation every 250 million years. 

Hence, it takes more than 10 million years for even the small amount of rotation illustrated here. 

Credit: NASA, ESA, and G. Bacon, R. van der Marel, A. Feild, L. Frattare, Z. Levay, and F. Summers (STScI)

"Determining a galaxy's rotation by measuring its instantaneous back and forth motions doesn't allow one to actually see things change over time," said van der Marel, the lead author on a paper in the Feb. 1 issue of the Astrophysical Journal describing and interpreting the results.

"By using Hubble to study the stars' motions over several years, we can actually for the first time see a galaxy rotate in the plane of the sky."

More Information: Third-epoch Magellanic Cloud Proper Motions. II. The Large Magellanic Cloud Rotation Field in Three Dimensions: Roeland P. van der Marel1 and Nitya Kallivayalil - iopscience.iop.org/0004-637X/781/2/121/article

Orbital Science Dragon Spacecraft captured by ISS Canadarm-2

The Orbital Sciences' vehicle was captured by the International Space Station's robotic arm on September 29th, 2013.

Credit: NASA

Subaru Telescope: Pink Alien Planet GJ 504b Image Captured

Glowing a dark magenta, the newly discovered exoplanet GJ 504b weighs in with about four times Jupiter's mass, making it the lowest-mass planet ever directly imaged around a star like the sun.

This image is an artist's representation of the alien world. 

Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center/S. Wiessinger

Astronomers have snapped a photo of a pink alien world that's the smallest yet exoplanet found around a star like our sun.

The alien planet GJ 504b is a colder and bluer world than astronomers had anticipated and it likely has a dark magenta hue, infrared data from the Subaru Telescope in Hawaii revealed.

"If we could travel to this giant planet, we would see a world still glowing from the heat of its formation with a color reminiscent of a dark cherry blossom, a dull magenta," study researcher Michael McElwain, of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., said in a statement from the space agency.

Soyuz TMA-07M spacecraft is captured landing with Expedition 35 crew on board

The Soyuz TMA-07M spacecraft is seen as it lands with Expedition 35 crew.

On board was Commander Chris Hadfield of the Canadian Space Agency (CSA), NASA Flight Engineer Tom Marshburn and Russian Flight Engineer Roman Romanenko of the Russian Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos). 

The module landed safely in a remote area near the town of Zhezkazgan, Kazakhstan, on Tuesday, May 14, 2013. 

Hadfield, Marshburn and Romanenko returned from five months onboard the International Space Station where they served as members of the Expedition 34 and 35 crews.

Image Credit: NASA/Carla Cioffi

Near-Earth Asteroid Captured by Amateur Astronomer - Video

Gianluca Masi (www.virtualtelescope.eu) captured telescope video of asteroid 2012 QG42 on September 11, 2012. It will pass 1,739,839 miles from Earth on September 14th and is about the size of three football fields. Credit: Gianluca Masi

Perseid Meteor shower captured by NASA Astronaut Ron Garan

NASA astronaut Ron Garan (@Astro_Ron) has shared this shot of his spectacular view from the International Space Station.

MARS Dust Devil image captured by Opportunity

Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Cornell University/Texas A and M

This is the first dust devil that NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity has observed in the rover's six-and-a-half years on Mars.

The whirlwind appeared in a routine drive-direction image taken by Opportunity's panoramic camera right after a drive during the 2,301st Martian day, or sol, of the rover's mission on Mars (July 15, 2010).

Contrast has been stretched, and the image has been carefully calibrated to make the dust devil easier to see against the Martian sky.

Opportunity's twin, Spirit, has observed dozens of dust devils at its location in Gusev Crater halfway around Mars from Opportunity's location in the Meridian Planum region.

Opportunity conducted systematic searches for dust devils in past years without seeing any. A rougher and dustier surface at Gusev makes dust devils form more readily there than at Meridiani.