Recent photos from the International Space Station’s Expedition 53 crew show wildfires burning in Southern California, expansive views of the Himalayas, cities by night and day, and colorful vistas of sites around the world.
The space station orbits around 250 miles (450 kilometers) above Earth, on a path that takes it between 51.6 degrees north and south latitude on each 90-minute trip around the planet.
These images captured from over the last three months were shared by the station’s crew on social media, or posted on NASA’s website. The captions were written by NASA, or one of the station crew members.
The pre-launch news conference for the Jason 3 ocean altimetry mission, scheduled for launch from Vandenberg Air Force Base, California, aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. (Membership required.)
A two-stage Northrop Grumman Antares rocket rolled out of its horizontal integration facility Monday for the mile-journey south to launch pad 0A at the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport in Virginia, where liftoff on a space station resupply mission is scheduled for Wednesday.
A commercial resupply freighter owned and operated by SpaceX wrapped up a two-day trip to the International Space Station on Wednesday, delivering a new docking port and two tons of other equipment to research laboratory more than 250 miles above Earth.