NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC'S SPACE PICTURES THIS WEEK LX

Space Pictures This Week: Volcanic Vortices and Asteroid Families
By Andrew Fazekas, National Geographic News, 31 May 2013.

An asteroid family is born and a nebula reveals its secrets in this week's best new space pictures.

1. A Violent Birth

With the world abuzz this week about Earth's close encounter with a giant asteroid, NASA scientists announced on May 30 the discovery of an entire new family of these celestial rocks hiding out in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.

This artist's impression depicts the violent birth of one of these new-found families. A violent smashup creates fragments that fly apart, forming loose groups that orbit the sun as new asteroid families.

NASA researchers were able to identify 28 separate groups of asteroids by scanning millions of infrared snapshots from the asteroid-hunting portion of the WISE (Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer) all-sky survey.

The next step will be for researchers to identify the parent objects that created these hundreds of newly discovered asteroids. (Related: “Asteroid Impacts: 10 Biggest Known Hits.”)

2. White Web

A busy web of white roads and wells from an oil field crisscross southwestern Kazakhstan's Mangistau region (map), east of the Caspian Sea in this image by South Korea's KOMPSAT satellite.

The image, released May 24, shows flatland covered by low-lying vegetation, with water and wetlands near the top of the picture.

3. Revealed

In an image released May 24, NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope's infrared eye peels back layers of gas and dust belonging to a giant star factory, revealing a cluster of young stars swaddled within.

The Iris Nebula, about 1,300 light-years from Earth, is lit up by the ultraviolet radiation emanating from the stars within.

4. Triple Planet Huddle

Photograph by Ajay Talwar, TWAN

Like the tip of a cosmic arrow pointing toward the heavens, three bright, star-like planets form a distinct triangular pattern in the darkening skies above the Himalayas in the last week of May. (Related: “Skywatcher's Guide: Eye-Catching Triple Planet Huddle.”)

Mercury, Venus, and Jupiter slowly converged just above the northwestern horizon over the course of a few weeks. But their proximity as seen from Earth is an optical illusion, since the three planets are actually separated by hundreds of millions of miles.

Sunlight reflecting from the surface of Mercury takes just over nine minutes to reach our planet. And light on a one-way trip from the gas giant Jupiter to Earth takes nearly 51 minutes to reach us.

5. Blast-off!

The explosive launch of a Soyuz rocket to the International Space Station (ISS) on May 29, from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, marks the start of Expedition 36.

The rocket ferried Commander Fyodor Yurchikhin of the Russian Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos), along with flight engineers Luca Parmitano of the European Space Agency and Karen Nyberg of NASA.

Less than six hours after lift-off, and after four orbits of Earth, the Russian capsule docked with the football-field-size ISS.

Four spacewalks are planned over the course of the four-month-long expedition, including the first by an Italian. (Related: “Serious Space Station Leak Provokes Weekend Spacewalk.”)

6. Volcano Vortex

A serpentine-shaped cloud appears to slither from a volcanic island off the coast of Mexico in this orbital image snapped by NASA's Earth observation satellite Aqua, released May 31.

Strong winds that blow up against the steep walls of Isla Socorro's 3,445-foot (1,050-meter) shield volcano create stunning cloud patterns, including curious swirls and vortices over the ocean known as von Kármán vortex streets.

[Source: National Geographic News. Edited.]