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Space shuttle Atlantis and its six-member crew began an 11-day delivery flight to the International Space Station on Monday with a 2:28 p.m. EST launch from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The shuttle will transport spare hardware to the outpost and return a station crew member who spent more than two months in space

This concept animation shows just one of many potential concepts for how the first human landing site on Mars might evolve throughout the course of multiple human expeditions to the Red Planet over a decade or more.

On Aug. 21, 2017, a solar eclipse passed over North America. People throughout the continent experienced a partial solar eclipse, and a total solar eclipse passed over a narrow swath of land stretching from Oregon to South Carolina, called the path of totality. NASA and its partners' satellites had a unique vantage point to watch the eclipse. Several Sun-watching satellites were in a position to see the Moon cross in front of the Sun, while many Earth-observing satellites - and NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, which typically images the Moon's landscape - captured images of the Moon's shadow on Earth's surface.

NASA’s SpaceX Crew-5 astronauts lifted off at 12 p.m. EDT Wednesday, Oct. 5, from Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, bound for the International Space Station for the fifth commercial crew rotation mission aboard the microgravity laboratory. The SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket propelled the Crew Dragon spacecraft with NASA astronauts Nicole Mann and Josh Cassada, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) astronaut Koichi Wakata, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Anna Kikina, into orbit to begin a long-duration science mission on the space station. The Crew Dragon spacecraft, named Endurance, will dock autonomously to the forward port of the station’s Harmony module at 4:57 p.m. EDT Thursday, Oct. 6.