🔵From Florida to Pluto to the Kuiper Belt and beyond! Exactly 15 years ago today, an uncrewed NASA spacecraft by the name of New Horizons blasted off on a 3 billion-mile journey to Pluto from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station by an @ULALaunch Atlas rocket at a speed of about 36,400 mph (16.26 km/s). It was the fastest human-made object EVER launched from Earth. By launching in 2006, New Horizons was able to take advantage of an assist from Jupiter. The Pluto probe approached a rendezvous with Jupiter and used the giant planet as a gravity-based slingshot. The five-month flyby induced a colossal burst of speed, accelerating the spacecraft by 9000 mph up to 52,000 mph. At that wild speed, you could soar from Los Angeles to New York in less than 4 minutes! After passing through the Pluto system in 2015, the spacecraft retargeted itself for an encounter with a Kuiper Belt Object (KBO) called Arrokoth, a Native American term meaning “sky” in the Powhatan/Agonquian language. While there, the spacecraft gathered data that researchers believe could contribute to our understanding of the origin of life on Earth. Credit: 🔵NASA 🔵NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI 🔵NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute/Roman Tkachenko #NASA #Pluto #PlutoFlyBy #Space #Galaxy #Universe #Exploration

\"Darkness cannot drive out darkness, only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that.\" — Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.⁣ ⁣ Today we honor his legacy with this stunning image from space of Atlanta, #MLK\'s birthplace, alight amidst the dark of night.⁣ ⁣ Credit: NASA⁣ ⁣ #MLKDay #NASA #Space #Atlanta #CityLights #Love

How blue-tiful! 🤩🌌 Near the outskirts of the Small Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy about 200 thousand light-years away, lies this 5 million year young and dazzling star cluster known as NGC 602. Inside the star cluster, bright, blue, newly formed stars are blowing a cavity in this nebula, sculpting the inner edge of its outer portions, slowly eroding it away and eating into the material beyond. Star formation started at the center of the cluster and propagated outward, with the youngest stars still forming today along the dust ridges. Fun fact: Did you know that the color of a star is directly linked to its surface temperature? The hotter the star, the shorter the wavelength of light it will emit. The hottest of stars are blue or blue-white and the cooler ones are red or red-brown. What color star would you be? Credit: NASA #NASA #Stars #Universe #Galaxy #BlueStars #Astronomy #FunFacts

Get in loser, we\'re going stargazing 🌌 Magnetic fields in Messier 82, or the Cigar galaxy, are shown here as lines over a visible light and infrared composite image of the galaxy from the @NASAHubble & the Spitzer Space Telescope. The galaxy located in the constellation Ursa Major is remarkable. Stellar winds streaming from hot new stars form a galactic super wind that blasts out plumes of hot gas (red) and a huge halo of smoky dust (yellow/orange) perpendicular to the narrow galaxy (white). Researchers used the Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (@sofiatelescope) magnetic field data and tools that have been used extensively to study the physics around the Sun to extrapolate the magnetic field’s strength 20,000 lights-years around the galaxy. The highways appear to extend indefinitely into intergalactic space, like the Sun’s solar wind, and may help explain how the gas and dust have traveled so far away from the galaxy. Credits: NASA, SOFIA, L. Proudfit; NASA, ESA, Hubble Heritage Team; NASA, JPL-Caltech, C. Engelbracht #NASA #M82 #Galaxy #Universe #Constellation #CigarGalaxy #UrsaMajor #SpaceHighway

In squad we trust 🚀 Upside down or right side up? The seven-member Expedition 64 crew takes a moment to pose for a quick portrait inside the @ISS’ Kibo laboratory module from @jaxajp (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency). Expedition 64 began in back in October 2020 with focused research investigations on biology, Earth science, human research, and more to provide the foundation for continuing human spaceflight beyond low-Earth orbit to the Moon and Mars! In the bottom row: NASA astronaut Kate Rubins @roscosmosofficial cosmonauts ⭐ Sergey Ryzhikov ⭐ Sergey Kud-Sverchkov In the top row: ⭐ @jaxajp astronaut @astro.soichi @NASAAstronauts ⭐ Michael Hopkins ⭐ @AstroVicGlover ⭐ Shannon Walker Glover and Hopkins are wearing white uniforms that commemorate the NASA human spaceflight programs Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, Apollo-Soyuz, Space Shuttle, Shuttle-Mir, International Space Station and Commercial Crew. Credit: NASA #NASA #SquadGoals #Astronauts #Apollo #Expedition64 #Family #CommercialCrew #Science #STEM #Skywalkers

🤯 Discovery alert: We don’t know of many planets quite like this! Thanks to data from our @NASAGoddard TESS mission, a planet existing around THREE stars has been confirmed, after a hefty hunt that spanned about 11 years! It all started shortly after NASA\'s Kepler mission began operations in 2009, when it identified what was thought to be a planet about the size of Neptune later known as KOI-5Ab. The planet which was the second new planet candidate to be found by the mission, was ultimately forgotten as Kepler racked up planet discoveries. Now, the chief scientist of NASA’s Exoplanet Science Institute says he has “resurrected KOI-5Ab from the dead!\" and we are so glad he did. Planet KOI-5Ab (shown here transiting across the face of a sun-like star), is located 1,800 light-years away in the Cygnus constellation. It is about one half the mass of Saturn & orbits a star (star A) with a relatively close companion (star B). Star A and star B orbit each other every 30 years. A third gravitationally bound star (star C) orbits stars A and B every 400 years. Illustration Credits: Caltech/R. Hurt (Infrared Processing and Analysis Center, or IPAC) #NASA #Galaxy #Universe #NewWorld #TripleStarSystem #NewDiscovery #LookUp #Space

It’s more than a feeling 🎵 Much like the delicate filaments of a spider\'s web, the glowing lights of the city of Boston seemingly spread from a central point in this image taken by the crew of the @ISS as it orbited 263 miles above Earth\'s surface. What city would you want to look at if you were fluttering about in space on a Friday in January? Credit: NASA #NASA #Earth #Views #Galaxy #Universe #Boston #Massachusetts

Bon Voyage, #Cygnus! 🦾 Yesterday, about three months after delivering nearly 8,000 pounds (3,628 kilograms) of scientific experiments, supplies, commercial products, hardware, and more to the @ISS, @NorthropGrumman’s uncrewed Cygnus cargo spacecraft departed the orbiting lab. Flight controllers on the ground sent commands to use the @CanadianSpaceAgency\'s Canadarm2 robotic arm to robotically detach Cygnus from the Earth-facing port of the unity module and maneuver it into place. Before the craft took off, the crew packed Cygnus with the Saffire V investigation & the SharkSat hosted payload to be conducted during an extended mission in orbit. It\'ll complete a series of milestones to move away safely & remain in orbit until Jan. 26, for an extended mission with science experiments. Photo Credit: NASA #NASA #NorthropGrumman #USA #Canada #Robotics #Earth #ISS #CanadArm2