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Image description: Ball Aerospace’s Jake Lewis is reflected in one of the mirrors on a James Webb Space Telescope.
Photo by David Higginbotham and Emmett Given, NASA.

Image description: Ball Aerospace’s Jake Lewis is reflected in one of the mirrors on a James Webb Space Telescope.

Photo by David Higginbotham and Emmett Given, NASA.

Image description: This new global view of Earth’s city lights is a composite assembled from data acquired by the Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership (NPP) satellite. The data was acquired over nine days in April 2012 and 13 days in October 2012. It took 312 orbits to get a clear shot of every parcel of Earth’s land surface and islands. This new data was then mapped over existing Blue Marble imagery of Earth to provide a realistic view of the planet.
View a larger image.
Image from NASA’s Earth Observatory/NOAA/DOD

Image description: This new global view of Earth’s city lights is a composite assembled from data acquired by the Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership (NPP) satellite. The data was acquired over nine days in April 2012 and 13 days in October 2012. It took 312 orbits to get a clear shot of every parcel of Earth’s land surface and islands. This new data was then mapped over existing Blue Marble imagery of Earth to provide a realistic view of the planet.

View a larger image.

Image from NASA’s Earth Observatory/NOAA/DOD

Image description: The Cassini spacecraft completed its initial four-year mission to explore the Saturn System in June 2008 and the first extended mission, called the Cassini Equinox Mission, in September 2010. Now, the healthy spacecraft is seeking to make exciting new discoveries in a second extended mission called the Cassini Solstice Mission.
Learn more about the Cassini Solstice Mission in this interactive timeline.

Image description: The Cassini spacecraft completed its initial four-year mission to explore the Saturn System in June 2008 and the first extended mission, called the Cassini Equinox Mission, in September 2010. Now, the healthy spacecraft is seeking to make exciting new discoveries in a second extended mission called the Cassini Solstice Mission.

Learn more about the Cassini Solstice Mission in this interactive timeline.

Image description: This round, gold coated secondary mirror that looks like a sun will fly aboard NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. The thickness of the gold coating on the mirrors is only 100 nanometers thick. A human hair is roughly 1,000 times thicker.
Photo by Chris Gunn, NASA.

Image description: This round, gold coated secondary mirror that looks like a sun will fly aboard NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. The thickness of the gold coating on the mirrors is only 100 nanometers thick. A human hair is roughly 1,000 times thicker.

Photo by Chris Gunn, NASA.

The Encyclopedia of Life recently celebrated the creation of its one millionth species page with the addition of hundreds of thousands of new images and specimen data from the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History.

The Encyclopedia of Life is building the largest online collection of biological descriptions, multimedia, and links about biological diversity on our planet. Anybody can join the community of scientists, learners, and citizens that are discussing, adding to, rating, organizing, and freely re-using the information.