satellites

Here's a view of the Space Shuttle you don't frequently see--a half-meter-resolution satellite photograph taken from orbit by GeoEye-1 shows Endeavour on the launchpad, ready to go.

After astronauts fixed the lens on the Hubble space telescope, the satellite began sending back pictures of the cosmos that left all onlookers in awe. The beauty of those images often overshadowed the legitimate scientific progress the Hubble enabled.

So, in honor of the Hubble’s final servicing mission, Popsci.com and Mario Livio, a senior astrophysicist at the Space Telescope Science Institute and author of Is God A Mathematician?, look past the pretty pictures and count down the ten most important scientific discoveries that the Hubble made possible.

It's miserable enough to be under the weather in the comfort of your home, but imagine coming down with a bad cold when you're stuck inside a small crew module 200,000 miles from Earth. You're coughing on your fellow astronauts and that space food you ate half an hour ago is now floating around your zero-gravity spacecraft.

Luckily, mission control packed some antibiotics into your survival pack... but will they work in space?

GeoEye-1 shot this photo on April 4, 2009 from a height of 423 miles, as the spacecraft moved from north to south along the eastern seaboard of the U.S.

We just live on Earth; the GeoEye-1 satellite orbits it 15 times a day, 420 miles high, at 16,800 miles per hour.

Here are some dazzling photos from its ultra-high-resolution spaceborne camera.

Humans have been looking to the heavens for as long as we have had stories to tell about them. But the way we look up has come quite far in the past 400 years, since Galileo Galilei first pointed a spyglass to the sky.

In honor of the 400th anniversary of the telescope, Popular Science looks back on the top 10 observatories on Earth and beyond.

If you've been following the status of Arctic sea ice for the past few years, hearing scientists herald the potential coming of an ice-free Arctic summer may sound like old news. But according to researchers at NASA and the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) in Boulder, Colo., this year, sea ice at the top of the globe may be even more vulnerable to melting than in the past.

This photo of Mount Redoubt, caught in mid-eruption, was taken from a height of 423 miles, on March 30, 2009 as the GeoEye-1 satellite moved from north to south over Alaska at a speed of 4 miles per second. Since the amount of area is so large, the ground resolution of this image is 2 meters.

What do you get when you ask a former Disney animator and veteran NASA climate geomorphologist to help explain global change?

How about cartoon satellites and a laser that can write your name on Titan?

Using gaming technology, animators and programmers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory designed a 3-D, browser-based program that lets people fly along with 15 NASA Earth observation satellites in real time. The program, called "Eyes on Earth 3-D," requires a plugin that's compatible with almost any Web browser.

Look out! says NASA. Three crew members evacuated the International Space Station earlier today. What could have caused such action? Garbage. A 13-centimeter-wide piece of space junk was projected to come within 4.5 kilometers of the space station. Not willing to take any risks, NASA told the crew to jump ship.

There's no denying that Google Earth has changed the way we view our planet's landscape. With a click of your mouse, you can "fly" around your own neighborhood, zooming in from space to street level. Curious about volcanoes? Dart over to the east coast of the Big Island of Hawaii and at times you can actually see the steam where lava enters the ocean. You can even explore the whitewater rapids on the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon.

But it was Google Earth's "Ocean" layer that recently caused quite a stir among 3D geeks.

Early this morning, thousands of scientists had their hearts broken as a NASA satellite crucial to studying climate change suffered a critical failure during launch and plunked into the Pacific Ocean.

Here are a couple more from our favorite eye in the sky.

Both half-meter resolution images were snapped from space by the GeoEye-1 satellite, which also took those fantastic pics of the National Mall on Inauguration Day.

As promised, here are stunningly clear satellite images of the tops of some two million heads during today’s inauguration. These images were snapped at 11:19am today by GeoEye-1, the most powerful commercial imaging satellite in the sky, from 423 miles above the trampled grass on the National Mall.

Who knew that the Capitol Building’s roof was bright green? I sure didn’t, until I saw this photo of the DC Mall taken by GeoEye-1, the most powerful commercial optical satellite in orbit.