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Shuttle status check
Space shuttle program manager Wayne Hale and launch director Mike Leinbach hold this news conference May 31 from Kennedy Space Center to offer a status report on STS-121 mission preparations. The briefing was held at the conclusion of the debris verification review, which examined the external fuel tank and threats to the shuttle from impacts during launch.

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STS-29: Tracking station in the sky
NASA created its Tracking and Data Relay Satellite (TDRS) system to serve as a constellation of orbiting spacecraft that would replace the costly ground tracking stations scattered around the globe for communications with space shuttles and other satellites. Space shuttle Discovery's STS-29 mission in March 1989 launched the massive TDRS-D craft. This post-flight film narrated by the crew shows the deployment, the astronauts running a series of medical tests and the monitoring of a student-developed chicken embryo experiment.

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STS-61C crew film
Space shuttle Columbia began mission STS-61C with a beautiful sunrise launch in January 1986 after several delays. Led by commander Hoot Gibson, the astronauts deployed a commercial communications satellite and tended to numerous experiments with the Materials Science Laboratory, Hitchhiker platform and Getaway Special Canisters in the payload bay. The crew included Congressman Bill Nelson of Florida, the first U.S. Representative to fly in space. Watch this post-flight film narrated by the astronauts.

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Delta 4 launches GOES
The Boeing Delta 4 rocket launches from pad 37B at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station with the GOES-N spacecraft, beginning a new era in weather observing for the Americas.

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Discovery goes to pad
As night fell over Kennedy Space Center on May 19, space shuttle Discovery reached launch pad 39B to complete the slow journey from the Vehicle Assembly Building. Discovery will be traveling much faster in a few weeks when it blasts off to the International Space Station.

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STS-61B: Building structures in orbit
The November 1985 flight of space shuttle Atlantis began with a rare nighttime blastoff. The seven-member crew, including a Mexican payload specialist, spent a week in orbit deploying three communications satellites for Australia, Mexico and the U.S. And a pair of high-visibility spacewalks were performed to demonstrate techniques for building large structures in space. The crew narrates the highlights of STS-61B in this post-flight crew film presentation.

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Hubble sees galaxy on edge
SPACE TELESCOPE SCIENCE INSTITUTE RELEASE
Posted: June 8, 2006


Credit: NASA, ESA, and The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)
Download larger image version here

 
This is a unique Hubble Space Telescope view of the disk galaxy NGC 5866 tilted nearly edge-on to our line-of-sight.

Hubble's sharp vision reveals a crisp dust lane dividing the galaxy into two halves. The image highlights the galaxy's structure: a subtle, reddish bulge surrounding a bright nucleus, a blue disk of stars running parallel to the dust lane, and a transparent outer halo.

Some faint, wispy trails of dust can be seen meandering away from the disk of the galaxy out into the bulge and inner halo of the galaxy. The outer halo is dotted with numerous gravitationally bound clusters of nearly a million stars each, known as globular clusters. Background galaxies that are millions to billions of light-years farther away than NGC 5866 are also seen through the halo.

NGC 5866 is a disk galaxy of type "S0" (pronounced s-zero). Viewed face on, it would look like a smooth, flat disk with little spiral structure. It remains in the spiral category because of the flatness of the main disk of stars as opposed to the more spherically rotund (or ellipsoidal) class of galaxies called "ellipticals." Such S0 galaxies, with disks like spirals and large bulges like ellipticals, are called 'lenticular' galaxies.

The dust lane is slightly warped compared to the disk of starlight. This warp indicates that NGC 5866 may have undergone a gravitational tidal disturbance in the distant past, by a close encounter with another galaxy. This is plausible because it is the largest member of a small cluster known as the NGC 5866 group of galaxies. The starlight disk in NGC 5866 extends well beyond the dust disk. This means that dust and gas still in the galaxy and potentially available to form stars does not stretch nearly as far out in the disk as it did when most of these stars in the disk were formed.

The Hubble image shows that NGC 5866 shares another property with the more gas-rich spiral galaxies. Numerous filaments that reach out perpendicular to the disk punctuate the edges of the dust lane. These are short-lived on an astronomical scale, since clouds of dust and gas will lose energy to collisions among themselves and collapse to a thin, flat disk.

For spiral galaxies, the incidence of these fingers of dust correlates well with indicators of how many stars have been formed recently, as the input of energy from young massive stars moves gas and dust around to create these structures. The thinness of dust lanes in S0s has been discussed in ground-based galaxy atlases, but it took the resolution of Hubble to show that they can have their own smaller fingers and chimneys of dust.

NGC 5866 lies in the Northern constellation Draco, at a distance of 44 million light-years (13.5 Megaparsecs). It has a diameter of roughly 60,000 light-years (18,400 parsecs) only two-thirds the diameter of the Milky Way, although its mass is similar to our galaxy. This Hubble image of NGC 5866 is a combination of blue, green and red observations taken with the Advanced Camera for Surveys in November 2005.