Portal:Outer space
Introduction
Outer space (or simply space) is the expanse beyond celestial bodies and their atmospheres. It contains ultra-low levels of particle densities, constituting a near-perfect vacuum of predominantly hydrogen and helium plasma, permeated by electromagnetic radiation, cosmic rays, neutrinos, magnetic fields and dust. The baseline temperature of outer space, as set by the background radiation from the Big Bang, is 2.7 kelvins (−270 °C; −455 °F).
The
Outer space does not begin at a definite altitude above Earth's surface. The Kármán line, an altitude of 100 km (62 mi) above
The concept that the space between the Earth and the Moon must be a vacuum was first proposed in the 17th century after scientists discovered that
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ESA, and the Hubble Heritage TeamThe Pillars of Creation, a series of elephant trunks of interstellar gas and dust in the Eagle Nebula, are the subject of a famous Hubble Space Telescope photograph taken in 1995. They are so named because the depicted gas and dust, while being eroded by the light from nearby stars, are in the process of creating new stars. Shown here is a 2014 rephotograph, which was unveiled in 2015 as part of the telescope's 25th anniversary celebrations.False-color Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter image of a side of the Chasma Boreale, a canyon in the polar ice cap of the Planum Boreum (north pole of Mars). Light browns are layers of surface dust, greys and blues are layers of water and carbon dioxide ice. Regular geometric cracking is indicative of higher concentrations of water ice.
The Planum Boreum's permanent ice cap has a maximum depth of 3 km (1.9 mi). It is roughly 1200 km (750 mi) in diameter, an area equivalent to about 1½ times the size of Texas. The Chasma Boreale is up to 100 km (62.5 mi) wide and features scarps up to 2 km (1.25 mi) high. For a comparison, the Grand Canyon is approximately 1.6 km (1 mi) deep in some places and 446 km (279 mi) long but only up to 24 km (15 mi) wide.probe to study the planet Saturn and its system, including its rings and its natural satellites.
This natural-color mosaic image, combining thirty photographs, was taken by the Cassini orbiter over the course of approximately two hours on 23 July 2008 as it panned its wide-angle camera across Saturn and its ring system as the planet approached equinox. Six moons are pictured in the panorama, with the largest, Titan, visible at the bottom left.tidal flexing) shift in relative position. Reddish regions are areas where the ice has a higher mineral content. The north polar region is at right. (Geologic features are annotated in Commons.)L2 Lagrange point. It is expected to launch in December 2021.UTC.A TRACE image of sunspots on the surface, or photosphere, of the sun from September 2002, is taken in the far ultraviolet on a relatively quiet day for solar activity. However, the image still shows a large sunspot group visible as a bright area near the horizon. Although sunspots are relatively cool regions on the surface of the sun, the bright glowing gas flowing around the sunspots have a temperature of over one million °C (1.8 million °F). The high temperatures are thought to be related to the rapidly changing magnetic field loops that channel solar plasma.Photograph: NASA, ESA, A. Aloisi (STScI/ESA), and The Hubble Heritage (STScI/AURA)-ESA/Hubble CollaborationAn image of NGC 4449, highlighting its qualities as a starburst galaxy. NGC 4449, an irregular galaxy in the constellation Canes Venatici located about 12 million light years from Earth, has a rate of star formation twice that of the Milky Way's satellite galaxy, the Large Magellanic Cloud. Interactions with nearby galaxies are thought to have influenced this star formation.probe has been able to survive more than a few hours on Venus's surface, which is completely obscured by clouds, because the atmospheric pressure is some 90 times that of the Earth's, and its surface temperature is around 450 °C (842 °F).rotation period and seasonal cycles are also similar to those of the Earth. Of all the planets in the Solar System other than Earth, Mars is the most likely to harbour liquid water and perhaps life. There are ongoing investigations assessing Mars's past potential for habitability, as well as the possibility of extant life. Future astrobiology missions are planned, including NASA's Mars 2020 rover and the European Space Agency (ESA)'s Rosalind Franklin rover. In November 2016, NASA reported finding a large amount of underground ice in the Utopia Planitia region of the planet. The volume of water detected has been estimated to be equivalent to the volume of water in Lake Superior. Mars has two moons, Phobos and Deimos, which are small and irregularly shaped.
This picture is a true-colour image of Mars, taken from a distance of about 240,000 kilometres (150,000 mi) by the OSIRIS instrument on ESA's Rosetta spacecraft, during its February 2007 flyby of the planet. The image was generated using OSIRIS's orange (red), green and blue filters.Neptune is the eighth and farthest known planet from the Sun in the Solar System. In the Solar System, it is the fourth-largest planet by diameter, the third-most-massive planet and the densest giant planet. Neptune is 17 times the mass of Earth, slightly more massive than its near-twin Uranus. Neptune is denser and physically smaller than Uranus because its greater mass causes more gravitational compression of its atmosphere. Neptune orbits the Sun once every 164.8 years at an average distance of 30.1 au (4.5 billion km; 2.8 billion mi). It is named after the Roman god of the sea and has the astronomical symbol ♆, a stylised version of the god Neptune's trident.
This picture of Neptune was taken by NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft in 1989, at a range of 4.4 million miles (7.1 million kilometres) from the planet, approximately four days before closest approach. The photograph shows the Great Dark Spot, a storm about the size of Earth, in the centre, while the fast-moving bright feature nicknamed the "Scooter" and the Small Dark Spot can be seen on the western limb. These clouds were seen to persist for as long as the spacecraft's cameras could resolve them.stitched image is composed of 405 individual images taken with five different filters on the panoramic camera over the course of five Martian days.Mercury is the smallest and closest to the Sun of the eight planets in the Solar System. It has no known natural satellites. The planet is named after the Roman deity Mercury, the messenger to the gods.Needle GalaxyPhotograph: Ken CrawfordNGC 4565 (also known as the Needle Galaxy) is an edge-on spiral galaxy about 30 to 50 million light-years away in the constellation Coma Berenices. NGC 4565 is a giant spiral galaxy more luminous than the Andromeda Galaxy, and has a population of roughly 240 globular clusters, more than the Milky Way.Image credit: Dave JarvisAn illustration of relative astronomical orders of magnitude, starting with the terrestrial planets of the Solar System in image 1 (top left) and ending with the largest known star, VY Canis Majoris, at the bottom right. The biggest celestial body in each image is shown on the left of the next frame.General images
The following are images from various outer space-related articles on Wikipedia.- Apollo CSM in lunar orbit (from
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Interstellar medium andastrosphere meeting (from Interstellar medium)
- Vanguard 1 is expected to remain in orbit for 240 years. (from
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Buzz Aldrin had a personal Communion service when he first arrived on the surface of the Moon. (from Space exploration)Astronaut
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James Webb Space Telescope to image the warm dust around a nearby young star, Fomalhaut, in order to study the first asteroid belt ever seen outside of the Solar System in infrared light. (from Cosmic dust)Astronomers used the
- Major elements of 200 stratospheric interplanetary dust particles. (from
- Objects in Earth orbit including fragmentation debris, November 2020, NASA: ODPO (from
- Three-dimensional structure in
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For the first time, theESA / Canadian Space Agency / James Webb Space Telescope has observed the chemical signature of carbon-rich dust grains at redshift, which is roughly equivalent to one billion years after the birth of the Universe, this observation suggests exciting avenues of investigation into both the production of cosmic dust and the earliest stellar populations in our Universe. (from Cosmic dust)
- Concept art for a NASA Vision mission (from
- Spatial density of LEO space debris by altitude, according to 2011 a NASA report to the
- Self-portrait of
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Delta-v's in km/s for various orbital maneuvers (from Space exploration)
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space suit while outside their spacecraft.Because of the hazards of a vacuum, astronauts must wear a pressurized
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SM-3 missile remain legal under space law, even though they create hazardous space debris (from Outer space)Conventional anti-satellite weapons such as the
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A computer-generated map of objects orbiting Earth, as of 2005. About 95% areartificial satellites (from Outer space)
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Tupan Patera on Io (from Space exploration)
- Saudi officials inspect a crashed PAM-D module in January 2001. (from
- Gabbard diagram of almost 300 pieces of debris from the disintegration of the five-month-old third stage of the Chinese Long March 4 booster on 11 March 2000 (from
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STS-121, a demonstration of orbiter heat shield repair techniques (from Outline of space science)Astronaut Piers Sellers during the third spacewalk of
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Large-scale matter distribution in a cubic section of the universe. The blue fiber-like structures represent the matter, and the empty regions in between represent thecosmic voids of the intergalactic medium (from Outer space)
- A dusty trail from the early Solar System to carbonaceous dust today. (from
- Model of Vostok spacecraft (from
- Asteroid
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ionized hydrogen (known by astronomers as H II from old spectroscopic terminology) in the parts of the Galactic interstellar medium visible from the Earth's northern hemisphere as observed with the Wisconsin Hα Mapper (Haffner et al. 2003) . (from Interstellar medium)The distribution of
- Cosmic dust of the
- Illustration of Earth's atmosphere gradual transition into outer space (from
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Bow shock formed by the magnetosphere of the young star LL Orionis (center) as it collides with the Orion Nebula flow
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TIROS-1 (1960) (from Space exploration)First television image of Earth from space, taken by
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caterpillar. (from Interstellar medium)This light-year-long knot of interstellar gas and dust resembles a
- Reconstruction of solar activity over 11,400 years. Period of equally high activity over 8,000 years ago marked. (from
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Outer space from theinterstellar space is visible, as well as in the foreground, above Earth, the airglow of the ionosphere just below and beyond the so-defined edge of space the Kármán line in the thermosphere (from Outer space)
- Artistic image of a rocket lifting from a Saturn moon (from
- Debris density in low Earth orbit (from
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Zvezda, the base ISS crew module (from Space exploration)Crew quarters on
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Apollo 16 LEM Orion, the Lunar Roving Vehicle and astronaut John Young (1972) (from Space exploration)
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A laser-guided observation of theMilky Way Galaxy at the Paranal Observatory in Chile in 2010 (from Outline of space science)
- Near-Earth space showing the low-Earth (blue), medium Earth (green), and high Earth (red) orbits. The last extends beyond the radius of geosynchronous orbits (from
- Artist's impression of dust formation around a supernova explosion. (from
- Perseverance's backshell sitting upright on the surface of Jezero Crater (from
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's solar panels degraded their performance. The damage is most noticeable on the panel on the right, which is facing the camera with a high degree of contrast. Extensive damage to the smaller panel below is due to impact with a Progress spacecraft. (from Space debris)Debris impacts on Mir
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Voyager 1 is the first artificial object to reach the interstellar medium. (from Interstellar medium)
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Sun located near the edge of the Local Interstellar Cloud and Alpha Centauri about 4 light-years away in the neighboring G-Cloud complex (from Interstellar medium)Map showing the
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comet Hale–Bopp are being shaped by pressure from solar radiation and the solar wind, respectively.The sparse plasma (blue) and dust (white) in the tail of
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Zodiacal light caused by cosmic dust. (from Cosmic dust)
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dB/km as a function of frequency over the EHF band. Peaks in absorption at specific frequencies are a problem, due to atmosphere constituents such as water vapor (H2O) and carbon dioxide (CO2). (from Interstellar medium)Atmospheric attenuation in
- Infographic showing the space debris situation in different kinds of orbits around Earth (from
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Baker-Nunn cameras were widely used to study space debris. (from Space debris)
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interplanetary dust cloud is illuminated and visible as zodiacal light, with its parts the false dawn, gegenschein and the rest of its band, which is visually crossed by the Milky Way (from Outer space)The black background is outer space as seen from Earth's surface at night. The
- A MESSENGER image from 18,000 km showing a region about 500 km across (2008) (from
- The diversity found in the different types and scales of astronomical objects make the field of study increasingly specialized. (from
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V-2 Rocket in the Peenemünde Museum (from Space exploration)
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Spent upper stage of aXSS 10 satellite (from Space debris)
- Cosmic dust of the
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Spirit rover (2004) (from Space exploration)Surface of Mars by the
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airglow is visible. (from Outer space)The boundary between space and Earth, at an altitude of 100 km, roughly where the yellow line of
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outer space global commons have so far not reduced the debris or the growth of objects in orbit (from Space debris)Growth of tracked objects in orbit and related events; efforts to manage
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Long Duration Exposure Facility (LDEF) is an important source of information on small-particle space debris. (from Space debris)The
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103P/Hartley (2010) (from Space exploration)Comet
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Magdeburg hemispheres (left) used to demonstrate Otto von Guericke's vacuum pump (right)The original
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Fengyun-1C debris one month after the weather satellite's disintegration by the Chinese ASAT (from Space debris)Known orbit planes of
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micrometeoroid left this crater on the surface of Space Shuttle Challenger's front window on STS-7. (from Space debris)A
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Space Shuttle Endeavour had a major impact on its radiator during STS-118. The entry hole is about 5.5 mm (0.22 in), and the exit hole is twice as large. (from Space debris)
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chondrite dust particle (from Cosmic dust)Porous
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Thefirst image of Earth taken by a person. South is up. (from Outer space)
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Artemis 1 mission (from Outer space)Earth and the Moon as seen from cislunar space on the 2022
- A proposed timeline of the origin of space, from
- Spatial density of space debris by altitude according to ESA MASTER-2001, without debris from the Chinese ASAT and 2009 collision events (from
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expansion of the universe, where space, including hypothetical non-observable portions of the universe, is represented at each time by the circular sections. On the left, the dramatic expansion occurs in the inflationary epoch; and at the center, the expansion accelerates (artist's concept; neither time nor size are to scale). (from Outer space)Timeline of the
- Smooth chondrite interplanetary dust particle. (from
- A drifting
Did you know (auto-generated)
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- ... that Louis W. Roberts was among the highest ranking African-American space program staff at NASA while the Apollo program was underway?
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