JIN_X

For the first time ever, fresh food grown in the microgravity environment of space is on the menu for NASA astronauts aboard the International Space Station. Expedition 44 crew members Scott Kelly, Kjell Lindgren and Kimiya Yui sampled the red romaine lettuce which was grown as part of the Veggie experiment after it had spent 33 days growing aboard the station. NASA is maturing Veggie technology aboard the space station to provide future pioneers with a sustainable food supplement – a critical part of NASA’s Journey to Mars. As NASA moves toward long-duration exploration missions farther into the solar system, Veggie will be a resource for crew food growth and consumption. It also could be used by astronauts for recreational gardening activities during deep space missions.

The sun is always changing and NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory is always watching. Launched on Feb. 11, 2010, SDO keeps a 24-hour eye on the entire disk of the sun, with a prime view of the graceful dance of solar material coursing through the sun's atmosphere, the corona. SDO's sixth year in orbit was no exception. This video shows that entire sixth year -- from Jan. 1, 2015, to Jan. 28, 2016, as one time-lapse sequence. At full quality on YouTube, this video is ultra-high definition 3840x2160 and 29.97 frames per second. Each frame represents 2 hours. A downloadable version has a frame rate of 59.94 with each frame representing 1 hour.

It’s always shining, always ablaze with light and energy that drive weather, biology and more. In addition to keeping life alive on Earth, the sun also sends out a constant flow of particles called the solar wind, and it occasionally erupts with giant clouds of solar material, called coronal mass ejections, or explosions of X-rays called solar flares. These events can rattle our space environment out to the very edges of our solar system. In space, NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory, or SDO, keeps an eye on our nearest star 24/7. SDO captures images of the sun in 10 different wavelengths, each of which helps highlight a different temperature of solar material. In this video, we experience SDO images of the sun in unprecedented detail. Presented in ultra-high definition, the video presents the dance of the ultra-hot material on our life-giving star in extraordinary detail, offering an intimate view of the grand forces of the solar system.

Our senses tell us about the natural world, but our senses cannot tell us everything. That’s why we use tools, and NASA develops some of the most sophisticated, most exciting tools of all. Designed to reveal aspects of the Earth, the Sun, The Moon, these tools gather essential data about the world around us, while other instruments peer way out to much more distant places. When these data are turned into visualizations, we discover a complexity and elegance to the natural world that would otherwise elude our physical senses. Even more important, we uncover vital clues to understand how things work, how they’re changing, and what the implications for those changes may mean. With the advent of Ultra-High-Definition video, more commonly known as “4K Video”, those images take on an enhanced majesty and power. In this video, we present images about our home planet, as well as the life-giving star it orbits, and the mysterious moon that travels with us through space.

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.

NASA Television’s newest offering, NASA TV UHD, brings ultra-high definition video to a new level with the kind of imagery only the world’s leader in space exploration could provide. Harmonic produced this show exclusively for NASA TV UHD, using time-lapses shot from the International Space Station, showing both the Aurora Borealis and Aurora Australis phenomena that occur when electrically charged electrons and protons in the Earth's magnetic field collide with neutral atoms in the upper atmosphere.

For Earth Day 2021, we explore the connections of Earth systems and NASA's ability to observe them in a changing world, highlighting the links between dust transport, vegetation, water quality, conservation and human health, the cryosphere, and disasters.

Join us for a fly-through of the International Space Station. Produced by Harmonic exclusively for NASA TV UHD, the footage was shot in Ultra High Definition (4K) using a fisheye lens for extreme focus and depth of field.

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.

The first time you see Planet Earth from space, it’s stunning; when you’ve spent 534 days in space—more than any other American—it still is! On his most recent trip the International Space Station NASA astronaut Jeff Williams used an Ultra High Definition video camera that he pointed at the planet 250 miles below; here he shares some of those images, and talks about the beauty of the planet, the variety of things to see, and the value of sharing that perspective with everyone who can’t go to orbit in person.

Got three minutes to spare for a tour of southern Europe? That’s all the time it takes, when you have a 4K camera orbiting Earth 250 miles up—and we do, on the International Space Station. This Ultra High Definition video was shot in August 2016 as the station traveled nearly 1000 miles, taking in views from above the western coast of France to the Iberian Peninsula, Italy, Switzerland, southern Germany and Austria, and southward to the countries of the Balkan Peninsula. Music by Joakim Karud.

The astronauts and cosmonauts on the International Space Station take pictures of Earth out their windows nearly every day, and over a year that adds up to thousands of photos. The people at the Earth Science and Remote Sensing Unit at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston had the enviable job of going through this year’s crop to pick their top 17 photos of Earth for 2017—here’s what they chose!

This visualization uses a digital 3D model of the Moon built from global elevation maps and image mosaics by NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter mission. It was created to accompany a performance of Claude Debussy's Clair de Lune by the National Symphony Orchestra Pops, led by conductor Emil de Cou, at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, DC, on June 1 and 2, 2018, as part of a celebration of NASA's 60th anniversary. Clair de Lune (moonlight in French) was published in 1905, as the third of four movements in the composer's Suite Bergamasque, and unlike the other parts of this work, Clair is quiet, contemplative, and slightly melancholy, evoking the feeling of a solitary walk through a moonlit garden. The visuals were composed like a nature documentary, with clean cuts and a mostly stationary virtual camera. The viewer follows the Sun throughout a lunar day, seeing sunrises and then sunsets over prominent features on the Moon. The sprawling ray system surrounding Copernicus crater, for example, is revealed beneath receding shadows at sunrise and later slips back into darkness as night encroaches

While Apollo placed the first steps on the Moon, Artemis opens the door for humanity to sustainably work and live on another world for the first time. Using the lunar surface as a proving ground for living on Mars, this next chapter in exploration will forever establish our presence in the stars. ✨

Bennu is one of Earth closest planetary neighbors- an asteroid roughly the height of a skyscraper.