Mapex

Archive for April, 2010

NASA’s Human Research Program and the National Space Biomedical Research Institute, or NSBRI, of Houston will fund 11 proposals to help investigate questions about astronaut health and performance on future space exploration missions.

High above the African continent, tall, dense cumulonimbus clouds, meaning ‘column rain’ in Latin, are the result of atmospheric instability. The clouds can form alone, in clusters, or along a cold front in a squall line. The high energy of these storms is associated with heavy precipitation, lightning, high wind speeds and tornadoes. Image Credit: NASA

Community college students have been selected to travel to NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, May 20-22, for an out-of-this-world experience.

This other worldly landscape is actually Dagze Co, one of many inland lakes in Tibet. In glacial times, the region was considerably wetter, and lakes were correspondingly much larger, as evidenced by the numerous fossil shorelines that circle the lake and attest to the presence of a previously larger, deeper lake. Over millennia changes in climate have resulted in greater aridity of the Tibetan Plateau. Image Credit: NASA/GSFC/METI/ERSDAC/JAROS, and U.S./Japan ASTER Science Team

Venus Express has completed an ‘aerodrag’ campaign that used its solar wings as sails to catch faint wisps of the planet’s atmosphere. The test used the orbiter as an exquisitely accurate sensor to measure atmospheric density barely 180 km above the hot planet.

In this image taken just under two hours ago (14:45 CET) by ESA’s Envisat satellite, a heavy plume of ash from the Eyjafjallajoekull Volcano is seen travelling in a roughly southeasterly direction.

Space shuttle Discovery and seven astronauts ended a 14-day journey of more than 6.2 million miles with a 9:08 a.m. EDT landing Tuesday at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

The STS-131 crew snapped this image as space shuttle Discovery remained docked with the International Space Station. The Leonardo Multi-Purpose Logistics Module can be seen in Discovery?s payload bay. Earth?s horizon and the blackness of space provide the backdrop for the scene. Image Credit: NASA

NASA centers across the nation invite journalists and the public to see and hear about the agency’s contributions to exploring and protecting our home planet during this year’s Earth Day celebrations.

Space shuttle Discovery and its seven-member crew are expected to return to Earth on Monday, April 19, after a 14-day mission.