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Illustrations of Spacecraft and the Cosmos
Artists's Conception of Cassini Saturn Orbit Insertion  This is an artists concept of Cassini during the Saturn Orbit Insertion(SOI) maneuver, just after the main engine has begun firing. The spacecraft is moving out of the plane of the page and to the right(firing to reduce its spacecraft velocity with respect to Saturn) and has just crossed the ring plane.<BR><BR>The SOI maneuver, which is approximately 90 minutes long, will allow Cassini to be captured by Saturn's gravity into a five-month orbit.Cassini's close proximity to the planet after the maneuver offers a unique opportunity to observe Saturn and its rings at extremely high resolution. A Disintegrating Galaxy Plows Through Space  This is an artist's conception of the spiral galaxy C153. The galaxy looks peculiar because it is plowing through the heart of a distant galaxy cluster at 4.5 million miles per hour. Gas compressed along the galaxy's leading edge, like snow before a plow, ignited a firestorm of new star birth. The ram pressure of external hot gas trapped in the cluster is stripping away the galaxy's own cooler gas, leaving behind its skeletal spiral arms of dust and stars. The galaxy trails a 200,000-light-year-long streamer of gas bleeding off the disk. In this painting the streamers appear foreshortened in this head-on view of the approaching galaxy. This painting is based on observations from optical, radio and X-ray telescopes. Parallel observations at different wavelengths trace how stars, gas, and dust are being tossed around and torn from the fragile galaxy. Artist's Concept of Sedna  In this artist's visualization, the newly discovered planet-like object, dubbed "Sedna," is shown where it resides at the outer edges of the known solar system. The object is so far away that the Sun appears as an extremely bright star instead of a large, warm disc observed from Earth. All that is known about Sedna's appearance is that it has a reddish hue, almost as red and reflective as the planet Mars. In the distance is a hypothetical small moon, which scientists believe may be orbiting this distant body.
Intergalactic Vista From A Lonely Star  This is an artist's concept of the view of the nighttime sky from the surface of a hypothetical planet orbiting an 'intergalactic' star in the Virgo cluster of galaxies, based on recent research with the Hubble Space Telescope. Closing in on distant, infant galaxies  James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is to many astronomers the space observatory of the next decade. SST and the Milky Way, an Artist's Concept  The Spitzer Space Telescope whizzes in front of a brilliant, infrared view of the Milky Way galaxy's plane in this artistic depiction. The mission marks the last of NASA's Great Observatories, a program that includes the Hubble Space Telescope, the Chandra X-Ray Observatory and the Compton Gamma-Ray Observatory. In addition to studying many of the coldest, oldest and most dust-enshrouded objects and processes in the universe, the mission will also be an important part of NASA's Origins Program, which seeks to answer the questions: Where did we come from? Are we alone?
Mega Starbirth Cluster  This illustration shows an artist's impression of the so-called Lynx arc, a newly identified distant super-cluster that contains a million blue-white stars twice as hot as similar stars in our Milky Way galaxy. The Lynx arc is one million times brighter than the well-known Orion Nebula, a nearby prototypical "starbirth" region visible with small telescopes. The stars in the Lynx arc are more than twice as hot as the Orion Nebula's central stars, with surface temperatures up to 80, 000°C. Though there are much bigger and brighter star-forming regions than the Orion Nebula in our local Universe, none are as bright as the Lynx arc, nor do they contain such large numbers of hot stars. The stars are so hot that a very large fraction of their light is emitted in the ultraviolet that makes the gas glow with the green and red colors illustrated here. Supernova 1993J exploding (artist's impression)  New observations with the Hubble Space Telescope allow a look into a supernova explosion under development. In this artist’s view the red supergiant supernova progenitor star (left) is exploding after having transferred about 10 solar masses of hydrogen gas to the blue companion star (right). This interaction process happened over about 250 years and affected the supernova explosion to such an extent that SN 1993J was later known as one of the most peculiar supernovae ever seen. Microquasar GRO J1655-40  GRO J1655-40 is the second so-called "microquasar" discovered in our Galaxy. Microquasars are black holes of about the same mass as a star. They behave as scaled-down versions of much more massive black holes that are at the cores of extremely active galaxies, called quasars. Astronomers have known about the existence of stellar-mass black holes since the early 1970s. Their masses can range from 3.5 to approximately 15 times the mass of our Sun. The companion star had apparently survived the original supernova explosion that created the black hole. It is an ageing star that completes an orbit around the black hole every 2.6 days. It is being slowly devoured by the black hole. Blowtorch-like jets (shown in blue) are streaming away from the black-hole system at 90% of the speed of light.
Pulsar and Companion  The artist's impression shows the pulsar (seen in blue with two radiation beams) and its bloated red companion star in the globular cluster NGC 6397. Scientists believe that the best explanation for seeing a bloated red star instead of a "quiet" white dwarf in the system is that the pulsar only recently has been spun up to its current rotation speed of 274 times per second by the gases transferred by the red star. It is the first time such a system has been observed. Missing Link Found Between Supernovae and Black Holes  This artist's impression shows a black hole and its yellow companion star being sent out on a out on a long journey through the Milky Way galaxy by the explosive kick of a supernova - one of the Universe's most titanic events. Evaporating Planet  This artist's impression shows a dramatic close-up of the scorched extrasolar planet HD 209458b in its orbit 'only' 7 million kilometers from its yellow Sun-like star. The planet is a type of extrasolar planet known as a 'hot Jupiter'. Astronomers have observed the atmosphere of an extrasolar planet evaporating off into space (shown in blue in this illustration). Much of this planet may eventually disappear, leaving only a dense core. Astronomers estimate the amount of hydrogen gas escaping HD 209458b to be at least 10,000 tons per second, but possibly much more. The planet may therefore already have lost quite a lot of its mass
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