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NASA astronaut Jasmin Moghbeli, ESA (European Space Agency) astronaut Andreas Mogensen, JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) astronaut Satoshi Furukawa, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Konstantin Borisov launched aboard the SpaceX Dragon Endurance spacecraft on Aug. 26 on a Falcon 9 rocket from Launch Complex 39A at the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The four crew members are scheduled to arrive at the International Space Station on Aug. 27 where they will conduct a six-month mission living and working aboard the microgravity laboratory to advance scientific knowledge and demonstrate new technologies for future human and robotic exploration missions. Such research benefits people on Earth and lays the groundwork for future human exploration through the agency’s Artemis missions, which will send astronauts to the Moon to prepare for future expeditions to Mars.

NASA’s SpaceX Dragon Endurance spacecraft carrying NASA astronaut Jasmin Moghbeli, ESA (European Space Agency) astronaut Andreas Mogensen, JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) astronaut Satoshi Furukawa, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Konstantin Borisov autonomously docked to the space-facing port of the Harmony module of the International Space Station at 9:16 a.m. EDT on Aug. 27 following a launch the day before on the SpaceX Dragon Endurance spacecraft aboard a Falcon 9 rocket from Launch Complex 39A at the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Following docking, the quartet opened the hatch and floated onboard the orbital outpost before providing welcoming remarks as their mission aboard the space station began. The four crew members will conduct a long-duration science mission living and working aboard the microgravity laboratory to advance scientific knowledge and demonstrate new technologies for future human and robotic exploration missions. Such research benefits people on Earth and lays the groundwork for future human exploration through the agency’s Artemis missions, which will send astronauts to the Moon to prepare for future expeditions to Mars.

In this video captured at 1,500 frames per second with a high-speed camera, the International Space Station, with a crew of six onboard, is seen in silhouette as it transits the sun at roughly five miles per second during a partial solar eclipse, Monday, Aug. 21, 2017 near Banner, Wyoming. Onboard as part of Expedition 52 are: NASA astronauts Peggy Whitson, Jack Fischer, and Randy Bresnik; Russian cosmonauts Fyodor Yurchikhin and Sergey Ryazanskiy; and ESA (European Space Agency) astronaut Paolo Nespoli. A total solar eclipse swept across a narrow portion of the contiguous United States from Lincoln Beach, Oregon to Charleston, South Carolina. A partial solar eclipse was visible across the entire North American continent along with parts of South America, Africa, and Europe. Photo Credit: (NASA/Joel Kowsky)

By combining the visible and infrared capabilities of the Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes, astronomers and visualization specialists from NASA’s Universe of Learning program have created a spectacular, three-dimensional, fly-through movie of the magnificent Orion nebula, a nearby stellar nursery. Using actual scientific data along with Hollywood techniques, a team at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland, and the Caltech/IPAC in Pasadena, California, has produced the best and most detailed multi-wavelength visualization yet of the Orion nebula. Credit: Space Telescope Science Institute

This animation shows the path along Earth where Apophis will be visible on April 13, 2029. As the asteroid passes over the Atlantic ocean, its path briefly turns from red to grey – that is the moment of closest approach. After closest approach, the asteroid will move into the daytime sky and will no longer be visible.

A series of images shows New Horizons' view of Pluto during the final week of its almost 10-year, three-billion-mile journey.

This movie from the spacecraft's Heliospheric Imager shows Comet ISON, Mercury, Comet Encke andEarth over a five-day period from Nov. 20 to Nov. 25, 2013. The sun sits right of the field of view of this camera. Credit: NASA/STEREO Download a copy of this video at http://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/vis/a010000/...

A view of the United States during the total solar eclipse of Aug. 21, 2017, showing the umbra (black oval), penumbra (concentric shaded ovals) and path of totality (red). This version includes images of the sun, showing its appearance in a number of locations, each oriented to the local horizon. Credit: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio

The latest images (as of Sept. 11, 2015) downloaded from NASA's New Horizons spacecraft were stitched together and rendered on a sphere to make this flyover. This animation, made with the LORRI (Long Range Reconnaissance Imager) images, begins with a low-altitude look at the informally named Norgay Montes, flies northward over the boundary between informally named Sputnik Planum and Cthulhu Regio, turns, and drifts slowly east. During the animation, the altitude of the observer rises until it is about 10 times higher to show about 80% of the hemisphere New Horizons flew closest to on July 14, 2015. Credit: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI, Stuart Robbins

At 8 a.m. EDT on October 23, 2015, the National Hurricane Center reported Patricia became the strongest eastern north pacific hurricane on record with sustained winds near 200 mph. This animation of images captured from October 20 to 23 from NOAA's GOES-West satellite shows Hurricane Patricia near western Mexico. Credit: NASA/NOAA GOES Project

Images from NASA's New Horizons spacecraft were used to create this flyover video of Pluto's largest moon, Charon. The “flight” starts with the informally named Mordor (dark) region near Charon’s north pole. The camera then moves south to a vast chasm, descending from 1,100 miles (1,800 kilometers) to just 40 miles (60 kilometers) above the surface to fly through the canyon system. From there it’s a turn to the south to view the plains and "moat mountain," informally named Kubrick Mons, a prominent peak surrounded by a topographic depression. New Horizons Long-Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) photographs showing details at up to 400 meters per pixel were used to create the basemap for this animation. Those images, along with pictures taken from a slightly different vantage point by the spacecraft’s Ralph/ Multispectral Visible Imaging Camera (MVIC), were used to create a preliminary digital terrain (elevation) model. The images and model were combined and super-sampled to create this animation. Credit: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI/Stuart Robbins

Concept animation featuring notional crew operations during NASA's proposed Asteroid Redirect Mission

This video zooms into the barred spiral galaxy NGC 2525, located 70 million light-years away in the southern constellation Puppis. Roughly half the diameter of our Milky Way, it was discovered by British astronomer William Herschel in 1791 as a "spiral nebula." The sharpness of the image increases as we zoom into the Hubble view. As we approach an outer spiral arm a Hubble time-lapse video is inserted that shows the fading light of supernova 2018gv. Hubble didn't record the initial blast in January 2018, but for nearly one year took consecutive photos, from 2018 to 2019, that have been assembled into a time-lapse sequence. At its peak, the exploding star was as bright as 5 billion Suns.

The Pluto system as NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft saw it in July 2015. This animation, made with real images taken by New Horizons, begins with Pluto flying in for its close-up on July 14; we then pass behind Pluto and see the atmosphere glow in sunlight before the sun passes behind Charon. The movie ends with New Horizons’ departure, looking back on each body as thin crescents.

The Mercury transit will occur between about 7:12 a.m. and 2:42 p.m. EDT on May 9, 2016.

This animation shows how NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) would target and strike the smaller (left) element of the binary asteroid Didymos to demonstrate how a kinetic impact could potentially redirect an asteroid as part of the agency’s planetary defense program.

Geronimo Villanueva, a planetary scientist from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, created the sunset simulations while building a computer modeling tool for a possible future mission to Uranus, an icy-cold planet in the outer solar system. The animations show all-sky views as if you were looking up at the sky through a super wide camera lens from Earth, Venus, Mars, Uranus, and Titan.

RUSSIAN ACTRESS, PRODUCER LAUNCH ON SOYUZ TO THE INTERNATIONAL SPACE STATION Russian actress Yulia Peresild, Russian producer Klim Shipenko and veteran Russian cosmonaut Anton Shkaplerov of Roscosmos launched Oct. 5 on the Soyuz MS-19 spacecraft from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on a fast-track, two-orbit journey to the International Space Station. Peresild and Shipenko will be filming scenes for a movie while on board the outpost under a commercial agreement with Roscosmos. They will return to Earth Oct. 17 with station Flight Engineer Oleg Novitskiy while Shkaplerov remains on the complex through March 2022.

After making 18 orbits of Earth since its launch early Saturday morning, the Crew Dragon spacecraft successfully attached to the International Space Station’s Harmony module forward port via “soft capture” at 5:51 a.m. EST while the station was traveling more than 250 miles over the Pacific Ocean, just north of New Zealand. As the spacecraft approached the space station, it demonstrated its automated control and maneuvering capabilities by arriving in place at about 492 feet (150 meters) away from the orbital laboratory then reversing course and backing away from the station to 590 feet (180 meters) before the final docking sequence from about 65 feet (20 meters) away. The Crew Dragon used the station’s new international docking adapter for the first time since astronauts installed it during a spacewalk in August 2016, following its delivery to the station in the trunk of a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft on its ninth commercial resupply services mission. For the Demo-1 mission, Crew Dragon is delivering more than 400 pounds of crew supplies and equipment to the space station. A lifelike test device named Ripley also is aboard the spacecraft, outfitted with sensors to provide data about potential effects on humans traveling in Crew Dragon.

This movie zooms into the base of the heart-shaped feature on Pluto to highlight a new image captured by NASA's New Horizons. The new image, seen in black and white against a previously released color image of Pluto, shows a mountain range with peaks jutting as high as 11,000 feet (3,500 meters) above the surface of the icy body.

International Space Station’s Expedition 62 Crew Lands Safely in Kazakhstan Expedition 62 Commander Oleg Skripochka of Roscosmos and Flight Engineers Jessica Meir and Andrew Morgan of NASA landed safely on Earth near the town of Dzhezkazgan, Kazakhstan, April 17 after bidding farewell to their colleagues on the complex and undocking their Soyuz MS-15 spacecraft from the aft port of the Zvezda Service Module on the International Space Station. Skripochka and Meir completed 205 days in space, and Morgan wrapped up a 272-day mission on the orbital outpost.

NASA astronauts Shannon Walker, Victor Glover, Mike Hopkins and JAXA astronaut Soichi Noguchi arrive at the International Space Station.

NASA astronauts Robert Behnken and Douglas Hurley return to Ellington Field near NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston after splashing down inside SpaceX's Crew Dragon Endeavour spacecraft on Sunday, Aug. 2. NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine, Johnson Director Mark Geyer and invited guests provide a warm, socially distanced welcome. The SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft splashed down at 2:48 p.m. EDT Aug. 2 in the Gulf of Mexico near Pensacola, Florida, following a 63-day mission. The astronauts in the Crew Dragon spacecraft successfully launched from Kennedy Space Center’s historic Launch Pad 39A at 3:22 p.m. EDT on May 30 and arrived at the station’s Harmony port, docking at 10:16 a.m. EDT on May 31. This is SpaceX’s final test flight and is providing data on the performance of the Falcon 9 rocket, Crew Dragon spacecraft and ground systems, as well as in-orbit, docking, splashdown, and recovery operations.

NASA TV provided coverage of the prelaunch and launch activities for the SpaceX Crew Dragon launch escape demonstration, as part of the agency’s Commercial Crew Program, which is working with U.S. companies to launch American astronauts on American rockets and spacecraft from American soil.

Aurora are colorful lights in the night time sky primarily appearing in Earth's polar regions. But what causes them? The culprit behind aurora is our own Sun and the solar plasma that is ejected during a magnetic event like a flare or a coronal mass ejection. This plasma travels outward along with the solar wind and when it encounters Earth's magnetic field, it travels down the field lines that connect at the poles. Atoms in the plasma interacts with atoms in Earth's upper atmosphere. This reaction produces the colorful lights we call aurora.