NASA VIDEOS GALLERY

On Oct. 14, 2023, a “ring of fire,” or annular, solar eclipse will travel from Oregon coast to the Gulf of Mexico. Weather permitting, most of the Americas will be able to view at least a partial solar eclipse An annular solar eclipse occurs when the Moon passes between the Sun and the Earth, but is just far away enough in its orbit that the Sun is not completely covered—creating a large, bright ring in the sky. WARNING: During an annular eclipse, it is never safe to look directly at the Sun without specialized eye protection designed for solar viewing

Our Webb Space Telescope captures a cosmic ring, the team behind our upcoming Psyche mission, and the unique thing about a star that was ripped apart by a black hole … a few of the stories to tell you about – This Week at NASA!

Where are the Moon rocks from the Apollo missions kept? When they’re not being studied by institutions or enjoyed by museumgoers, NASA has a specialized Lunar Sample Curation Laboratory at NASA’s Johnson Space Center to store and keep these otherworldly samples safe. Studying these samples helps us learn more about the origin of not only our moon, but our planet. Deputy Apollo Sample Curator (Sept 2019 – Dec 2022) Dr. Juliane Gross explains more about lunar sample curation.

An international crew is preparing to launch to the International Space Station aboard NASA’s SpaceX Crew-7 mission. NASA astronaut Jasmin Moghbeli, ESA (European Space Agency) astronaut Andreas Mogensen, JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) astronaut Satoshi Furukawa, and cosmonaut Konstantin Borisov of Roscosmos will perform research technology demonstrations, science experiments, and maintenance activities aboard the microgravity laboratory. Crew-7 is targeted to launch no earlier than 3:27 a.m. EDT Saturday, Aug. 26 from Launch Complex 39A at Kennedy. As part of the agency’s Commercial Crew Program, Crew-7 marks the eighth human spaceflight mission supported by a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft and the seventh crew rotation mission to the space station since 2020 for NASA.

Find out why July 2023 was a record-breaking month, a high-flying NASA aircraft is helping to study lighting, and making landings safe for flights of the future … a few of the stories to tell you about – This Week at NASA!

An ultra-high-resolution NASA computer model has given scientists a stunning new look at how carbon dioxide in the atmosphere travels around the globe. Plumes of carbon dioxide in the simulation swirl and shift as winds disperse the greenhouse gas away from its sources. The simulation also illustrates differences in carbon dioxide levels in the northern and southern hemispheres and distinct swings in global carbon dioxide concentrations as the growth cycle of plants and trees changes with the seasons. The carbon dioxide visualization was produced by a computer model called GEOS-5, created by scientists at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center’s Global Modeling and Assimilation Office. The visualization is a product of a simulation called a “Nature Run.” The Nature Run ingests real data on atmospheric conditions and the emission of greenhouse gases and both natural and man-made particulates. The model is then left to run on its own and simulate the natural behavior of the Earth’s atmosphere. This Nature Run simulates January 2006 through December 2006. While Goddard scientists worked with a “beta” version of the Nature Run internally for several years, they released this updated, improved version to the scientific community for the first time in the fall of 2014.

On September 27th, 2015 there will be a very rare event in the night sky – a supermoon lunar eclipse. Watch this animated feature to learn more.

Although the moon has remained largely unchanged during human history, our understanding of it and how it has evolved over time has evolved dramatically. Thanks to new measurements, we have new and unprecedented views of its surface, along with new insight into how it and other rocky planets in our solar system came to look the way they do. See some of the sights and learn more about the moon here!

In a remote area of northwest Greenland, an international team of scientists has made a stunning discovery, buried beneath a kilometer of ice. It’s a meteor impact crater, 300 meters deep and bigger than Paris or the Beltway around Washington, DC. It is one of the 25 largest known impact craters on Earth, and the first found under any of our planet’s ice sheets. The researchers first spotted the crater in July 2015, while they were inspecting a new map of the topography beneath Greenland's ice sheet that used ice-penetrating radar data primarily from Operation IceBridge, an ongoing NASA airborne mission to track changes in polar ice, and earlier NASA airborne missions in Greenland

February 11, 2015 marks five years in space for NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory, which provides incredibly detailed images of the whole sun 24 hours a day. Capturing an image more than once per second, SDO has provided an unprecedentedly clear picture of how massive explosions on the sun grow and erupt ever since its launch on Feb. 11, 2010. The imagery is also captivating, allowing one to watch the constant ballet of solar material through the sun's atmosphere, the corona. In honor of SDO's fifth anniversary, NASA has released a video showcasing highlights from the last five years of sun watching. Watch the movie to see giant clouds of solar material hurled out into space, the dance of giant loops hovering in the corona, and huge sunspots growing and shrinking on the sun's surface. The imagery is an example of the kind of data that SDO provides to scientists. By watching the sun in different wavelengths – and therefore different temperatures – scientists can watch how material courses through the corona, which holds clues to what causes eruptions on the sun, what heats the sun's atmosphere up to 1,000 times hotter than its surface, and why the sun's magnetic fields are constantly on the move. Five years into its mission, SDO continues to send back tantalizing imagery to incite scientists' curiosity. For example, in late 2014, SDO captured imagery of the largest sun spots seen since 1995 as well as a torrent of intense solar flares. Solar flares are bursts of light, energy and X-rays. They can occur by themselves or can be accompanied by what's called a coronal mass ejection, or CME, in which a giant cloud of solar material erupts off the sun, achieves escape velocity and heads off into space. In this case, the sun produced only flares and no CMEs, which, while not unheard of, is somewhat unusual for flares of that size. Scientists are looking at that data now to see if they can determine what circumstances might have led to flares eruptions alone. Goddard built, operates and manages the SDO spacecraft for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington, D.C. SDO is the first mission of NASA's Living with a Star Program. The program's goal is to develop the scientific understanding necessary to address those aspects of the sun-Earth system that directly affect our lives and society

On August 31, 2012 a long filament of solar material that had been hovering in the sun's atmosphere, the corona, erupted out into space at 4:36 p.m. EDT. The coronal mass ejection, or CME, traveled away from the sun at over 900 miles per second. This movie shows the ejection from a variety of viewpoints as captured by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO), NASA's Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory (STEREO), and the joint ESA/NASA Solar Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO).

For the first time, NASA’s planet-hunting Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) watched a black hole tear apart a star from start to finish, a cataclysmic phenomenon called a tidal disruption event. The blast, named ASASSN-19bt, was found on Jan. 29 by the All-Sky Automated Survey for Supernovae (ASAS-SN), a worldwide network of 20 robotic telescopes. Shortly after the discovery, ASAS-SN requested follow-up observations by NASA’s Swift satellite, ESA’s (European Space Agency’s) XMM-Newton and ground-based 1-meter telescopes in the global Las Cumbres Observatory network. The disruption occurred in TESS’s continuous viewing zone, which is always in sight of one of the satellite’s four cameras. This allowed astronomers to view the explosion from beginning to end. This video shows images of a tidal disruption event called ASASSN-19bt taken by NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) and Swift missions, along with an animation illustrating how it unfolded. Because ASASSN-19bt occurred in the TESS continuous viewing zone, the satellite observed the full duration of the event.

This artist’s rendering illustrates new findings about a star shredded by a black hole. When a star wanders too close to a black hole, intense tidal forces rip the star apart. In these events, called “tidal disruptions,” some of the stellar debris is flung outward at high speed while the rest falls toward the black hole. This causes a distinct X-ray flare that can last for a few years. NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, Swift Gamma-ray Burst Explorer, and ESA/NASA’s XMM-Newton collected different pieces of this astronomical puzzle in a tidal disruption event called ASASSN-14li, which was found in an optical search by the All-Sky Automated Survey for Supernovae (ASAS-SN) in November 2014. The event occurred near a supermassive black hole estimated to weigh a few million times the mass of the sun in the center of PGC 043234, a galaxy that lies about 290 million light-years away. Astronomers hope to find more events like ASASSN-14li to test theoretical models about how black holes affect their environments. During the tidal disruption event, filaments containing much of the star's mass fall toward the black hole. Eventually these gaseous filaments merge into a smooth, hot disk glowing brightly in X-rays. As the disk forms, its central region heats up tremendously, which drives a flow of material, called a wind, away from the disk. Music credit: Encompass by Mark Petrie from Killer Tracks.

Eruptive events on the sun can be wildly different. Some come just with a solar flare, some with an additional ejection of solar material called a coronal mass ejection (CME), and some with complex moving structures in association with changes in magnetic field lines that loop up into the sun's atmosphere, the corona. On July 19, 2012, an eruption occurred on the sun that produced all three. A moderately powerful solar flare exploded on the sun's lower right hand limb, sending out light and radiation. Next came a CME, which shot off to the right out into space. And then, the sun treated viewers to one of its dazzling magnetic displays -- a phenomenon known as coronal rain. Over the course of the next day, hot plasma in the corona cooled and condensed along strong magnetic fields in the region. Magnetic fields, themselves, are invisible, but the charged plasma is forced to move along the lines, showing up brightly in the extreme ultraviolet wavelength of 304 Angstroms, which highlights material at a temperature of about 50,000 Kelvin. This plasma acts as a tracer, helping scientists watch the dance of magnetic fields on the sun, outlining the fields as it slowly falls back to the solar surface. The footage in this video was collected by the Solar Dynamics Observatory's AIA instrument. SDO collected one frame every 12 seconds, and the movie plays at 30 frames per second, so each second in this video corresponds to 6 minutes of real time. The video covers 12:30 a.m. EDT to 10:00 p.m. EDT on July 19, 2012.

From year to year, the moon never seems to change. Craters and other formations appear to be permanent now, but the moon didn't always look like this. Thanks to NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, we now have a better look at some of the moon's history. Learn more in this video!

The people who get to see the Earth from space marvel at its beauty, the colors, the fragility they feel about the planet 250 miles below them. Now it’s your turn: this ultra-high definition video, captured during the International Space Station’s Expedition 65, allows you an extended, appreciative gawk at the home planet in all its glory. Hit play, and go into orbit mode. This footage was shot from the International Space Station between April 17, 2021 – Oct. 17, 2021.

This year's annual Goddard Film Festival highlights the center’s achievements over the past year in astrophysics, Earth science, heliophysics and planetary science. Enjoy a video creator's eye view of the scientific achievements and engineering marvels that happen at Goddard every day. Ryan Fitzgibbons (KBRWyle) Lead Producer Lead Editor Christina Mitchell (KBRWyle) Producer Editor Kathryn Mersmann (GSFC) Producer Project Support Shireen Dooling (GSFC Intern) Project Support Music: “Alternative Earth,” “Garden Predators,” Universal Production Music

As of June 2020, NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory — SDO — has now been watching the Sun non-stop for over a full decade. From its orbit in space around the Earth, SDO has gathered 425 million high-resolution images of the Sun, amassing 20 million gigabytes of data over the past 10 years. This information has enabled countless new discoveries about the workings of our closest star and how it influences the solar system. With a triad of instruments, SDO captures an image of the Sun every 0.75 seconds. The Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA) instrument alone captures images every 12 seconds at 10 different wavelengths of light. This 10-year time lapse showcases photos taken at a wavelength of 17.1 nanometers, which is an extreme ultraviolet wavelength that shows the Sun’s outermost atmospheric layer — the corona. Compiling one photo every hour, the movie condenses a decade of the Sun into 61 minutes. The video shows the rise and fall in activity that occurs as part of the Sun’s 11-year solar cycle and notable events, like transiting planets and eruptions. The custom music, titled “Solar Observer,” was composed by musician Lars Leonhard (https://www.lars-leonhard.de/). While SDO has kept an unblinking eye pointed towards the Sun, there have been a few moments it missed. The dark frames in the video are caused by Earth or the Moon eclipsing SDO as they pass between the spacecraft and the Sun. A longer blackout in 2016 was caused by a temporary issue with the AIA instrument that was successfully resolved after a week. The images where the Sun is off-center were observed when SDO was calibrating its instruments. SDO and other NASA missions will continue to watch our Sun in the years to come, providing further insights about our place in space and information to keep our astronauts and assets safe.

On the left side of the frame is the full circle of the Sun. It appears in a golden yellow color, but splotchy and with thin yellow wisps extending from the surface. Some areas are very bright and others almost black. The whole Sun rotates steadily, with one full rotation taking 12 minutes in this time lapse. There are usually only a few bright regions visible at a time and they shift and flash like small fires. From these regions there are wispy loops reaching up above the surface that rapidly change shape and size. On the right side of the frame are two white-outlined squares with enlargements of interesting regions of the Sun