NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC'S SPACE PICTURES THIS WEEK LVI

Space Pictures This Week: Atlantis, Geyser Moon
By Brad Scriber, National Geographic News, 4 May 2013.

A shuttle stays under wraps and Saturn's moon spurts ice in this week's best space pictures.

1. Flaming Nebula

Radiation from new-born stars heats up the Flame Nebula in the constellation Orion, some 1,300 light-years from Earth.

The resulting infrared light reached the European Space Agency's Herschel space telescope's sensitive instruments on April 18, and was coloured white, yellow, and pink to create this image.

The star illuminating the Flame Nebula would appear as another dot on Orion's belt but for the huge cloud of dust obscuring it from view and making it appear four billion times dimmer.

2. That's a Wrap

Engulfed in 16,000 square feet (1,486 square meters) of protective plastic shrink-wrap since last November, the space shuttle Atlantis awaits unveiling at a new $100 million facility at the Kennedy Space Centre, scheduled to open June 29, 2013.

Atlantis was the fourth space shuttle built and the final one to fly, taking food and other supplies to the International Space Station before touching down on Earth in the early hours of July 21, 2011. That 135th touchdown brought the 30-year-long space shuttle era to a close.

"Although we got to take the ride," said commander Chris Ferguson after the landing, "we sure hope that everybody who has ever worked on, or touched, or looked at, or envied, or admired a space shuttle was able to take just a little part of the journey with us."

Visitors to the Kennedy Space Centre in Florida this summer will get a chance to join the list of admirers with a close-up look at the unwrapped Atlantis, complete with re-entry scars.

3. Colourful Chaos

The palette of pandemonium colours an interstellar cloud red, blue, and black as stars form within.

This image, captured by a telescope at the European Southern Observatory's La Silla Observatory at the fringe of Chile's Atacama Desert, shows a cloud of mostly hydrogen gas glowing red as electrons, freed by blasts of intense energy, recombine with the atoms. The blue area at right is reflected starlight bouncing off particles of dust. The dark splotches are regions where the dust is too thick for light to penetrate.

4. Geyser Moon

A plume of water vapour and ice spurts from cracks at the south pole of Saturn's moon Enceladus at a rate of about 200 pounds (100 kilograms) per second, hinting at a subsurface sea.

Observing the plasma, or hot ionized gas, spurting from these same openings may lead to insights about how sunlight and plasma interact to influence magnetic fields.

The face of the moon is illuminated by light reflected off Saturn in this April 29 photo captured from 483,000 miles (777,000 kilometres) away by NASA's Cassini spacecraft.

5. Supernova Puff

A thin shell of red gas is all that remains after a supernova explosion that occurred about six centuries ago. This wispy red veil was emitted by a former white dwarf, an older star that burned up all of its hydrogen and collapsed into itself.

This ball of gas appears in the constellation Dorado, which also contains the Large Magellanic Cloud, a neighbouring galaxy that orbits the Milky Way.

6. Ring of Fire

This wavelike appendage whipping out from the surface of the sun is known as a coronal mass ejection.

Sending up to a billion tons (900 million metric tons) of solar particles into space at over a million miles per hour (1.6 million kilometres per hour), these bursts of solar wind can cause significant disruptions to communication satellites orbiting Earth.

This image shows a loop arching away from the sun on May 1. The event took just a couple of hours from start to finish. See a video of it here.

[Source: National Geographic News. Edited.]