NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC'S SPACE PICTURES THIS WEEK XXI

Space Pictures This Week: Extreme Free Fall, Ice Island, More
By Kastalia Medrano, National Geographic News, 30 July 2012.

1. Heave Ho

An iceberg measuring nearly 50 square miles (130 square kilometres) floats away from the Petermann glacier in northwestern Greenland (map) in a colour-enhanced July 21 photograph snapped by NASA's Terra satellite.

Strong ocean currents - rather than, say, surface melting - likely caused the breakup, according to the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center.

Like many glaciers, Petermann glacier has been disintegrating (picture) in recent years.

(Related: "Ice Island Breaks off Greenland; Bigger Than Manhattan [2010].")

2. Touchdown

Austrian athlete Felix Baumgartner parachutes toward the desert after detaching from a space capsule 96,637 feet (29,455 meters) over Roswell, New Mexico, on July 25.

The test jump was the second for the Red Bull Stratos Project, which has the lofty goal of sending Baumgartner 120,000 feet (36,580 meters) up - to the edge of space - before he free-falls at supersonic speeds. If successful, Baumgartner will become the first person to break the speed of sound in free fall.

(See "'Jet Man' to Set Flight Record Over English Channel [2008].")

3. Twilight Zone

This eerie landscape - taken by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC) on July 11 - shows uncanny detail of the mountains within Copernicus crater, which runs nearly 60 miles (97 kilometres) wide and features peaks thousands of feet high.

The "fascinating and geologically rich" Copernicus crater represents a potential gold mine of information about the moon's surface, the website said.

The crater was a runner-up for the Apollo landing site, and has been suggested as a target for a robotic rover in a submission to NASA's Discovery Program.

(Learn more about the future of spaceflight.)

4. Stellar Line up

Pictured over Chile's Atacama desert, a handful of the brighter celestial bodies, as seen from Earth, fell quite literally into line in early July, as seen in a picture submitted to National Geographic's My Shot photo community on July 24.

The blue star cluster to the left is the Pleiades, also known as the Seven Sisters. Second from left is Jupiter, followed by Venus and the star Aldebaran.

Though the conjunction didn't stay in place for long, Jupiter and Venus remained large and bright in the early morning through the rest of July.

(Read more about the July conjunction.)

5. Golden Lakes

North America's Lake Ontario (middle) and Lake Huron (right) glow golden in what NASA calls sunglint - when light reflects off water back toward observers, in this case the crew of the International Space Station, which snapped the picture June 29.

When the image was taken, the ISS was over southeastern Nova Scotia (map). The thin golden strands to the left of Lake Ontario are the Finger Lakes, also illuminated by sunglint, while the large, partially lit lake to the left is Lake Erie.

(Also see "Down the Drain: The Incredible Shrinking Great Lakes.")

6. High and Dry

The geometric grid of urban sprawl is seen around Tucson, Arizona, in a picture released July 24 by the U.S. Geological Survey.

The Landsat satellite image, an update of a similar shot taken in 1965, shows how much development has occurred in the city, whose population has doubled since 1970.

The image also shows less vegetation and streams, compared with the 1965 shot. The decline in streams is due in part to pumping for groundwater to meet increasing demand for fresh water.

By measuring urbanization from space, Landsat can help determine which areas are in the most danger of drought.

(See "Pictures: Drought Parches Much of the U.S.")

Top image: A satellite image showing the huge ice island calved from Greenland's Petermann glacier. Courtesy of Prof. Andreas Muenchow, University of Delaware.

[Source: National Geographic News. Edited. Top image added.]