Astronauts on ISS beam holiday cheer to Earth for Christmas | Mars orbiters witness 'winter wonderland' on Red Planet | Aurora forecast: Northern lights for Christmas?
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They may not be home for the holidays, but astronauts on the International Space Station are getting festive for Christmas in space. "It's a great time of year up here," station commander Sunita Williams said in a video. See how the ISS crew is celebrating the season.
Hoping for a white Christmas this year? Well, even if there's no snow where you live, at least you can enjoy these images snow on a Martian landscape from ESA's Mars Express orbiter and NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.
Christmas week is here. And the night sky obliges by presenting a beautiful display of celestial sights, perfectly timed out to coincide with the holiday.
For better or for worse, a small part of the Apollo 11 spacecraft will now be Jon Mesick's to have and to hold for all the days of his life. The strip of golden thermal polyimide tape, which made the trip to the moon with the first astronauts to land there in 1969, is now the centerpiece of Mesick's custom wedding band made by the Honest Hands Rings Company of Morrison, Colorado
On Christmas Eve, a NASA spacecraft made history by coming closer to the sun than any spacecraft ever has before. This record-breaking feat was conducted by the Parker Solar Probe, which flew to within 3.8 million miles (6.1 million kilometers) of the sun, braving the blistering heat of our star's outer atmosphere, the corona.
An artist's rendering of the Parker Solar Probe passing through the sun's corona (NASA)
Far from damaging the Parker Solar Probe, a solar flare would allow the probe to gather rare data about how the sun's charged particles are accelerated to near-light speeds and dissect the dynamics of space weather — insights that would be valuable not only for understanding our sun but also for studying stars elsewhere in the universe, scientists say.
ULA CEO Tory Bruno outlined a vision for space defense and the Vulcan Centaur rocket in a blog post on Dec. 4, where he pointed out that while the military depends on space more than ever, U.S. military assets in space are currently without defense. "To keep the peace, we also must have a credible space defense."
"Doctor Who: Joy to the World" continues the veteran sci-fi show's two-decade run as a Christmas TV institution. The Time Lord has been a fixture of the BBC's festive schedules ever since 2005's "The Christmas Invasion", and this year is no different. Here's how to watch it from across time and space!
