The Wright brothers had no idea what they were getting into when they finally completed the first flight with their rickety wood and canvas contraption. But now, 110 years later, we’ve brought the concept of airplanes to a whole new level. Imagine riding in a plane that no longer fights the laws of nature but actually works with the natural environment to keep you up in the air.

Thanks to the scientists at the Ames Research Center at Moffett Field in California, airplanes can now rely on the power of the sun to fly. Known as the Solar Impulse HB-S1A, the first solar-powered craft can only handle one passenger at a time. But if history has taught us anything about the ingenuity of the human spirit, we know that more advances are just around the corner and soon we might all be flying with nothing more than the clean energy of the sun.

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Google recently announced on their blog that they’ve been working with the U.S. Geological Survey, NASA and TIME to release compilations of Earth images taken from space for the interactive Timelapse project.

These compiled images include Lake Urmia drying up, Las Vegas’ urban growth, Dubai’s coastal expansion with its Palm Islands, Alaska’s Columbia Glacier retreat and the Brazilian Amazon deforestation. It’s amazing to see just how much the face of Earth has changed in the span of just three decades because of us people everywhere.

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In honor of its Opportunity rover which has been doing some intensive Mars sightseeing for close to a decade, NASA came up with a infographic chart that showed the distances that have been embarked on by its other vehicles on terrains out there in space. The Opportunity has roved 35.760 kilometers around the rim of Mars’ Endeavour crater, well ahead of the Apollo 17 moon buggy’s 35.744 kilometers. Never mind that the Curiosity rover has managed just less than a kilometer so far since it landed in August; it has at least 14 years in its nuclear batteries to catch up.

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Gamma Ray bursts were first stumbled upon back in the 1960s. They built telescopes to pick up on secret thermonuclear tests by the Soviets and Chinese, but they also began picking up on Gamma Rays generated from huge explosions in outer-space. Though this confounded scientists at the start, they now accept that these explosions go off about once a day.

Now, with the help of NASA satellites, Swift mission, and the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, we have images of the biggest gamma ray burst ever recorded. This vivid burst in the constellation Leo was so large that scientists now have much more information to study.

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This incredible video was made by NASA and shows three years of the sun in just three minutes. Each day is captured in two images, and throughout this video, you can see how the sun’s activity has increased in just three years. The video also shows interesting solar phenomena including two partial eclipses of the sun by the moon, two roll maneuvers, the largest flare of this solar cycle, comet Lovejoy, and the transit of Venus.

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NASA may have an outstanding space program, but they’re not too bad in the design department either. During the 1960s, hundreds of manuals, guidebooks, covers, and posters were created to promote NASA and their events. The posters are filled with vintage typography, classy artwork, and retro colors. The covers are set to be auctioned off at the 2013 April 18 Space Exploration Signature Auction

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At first glance, these vivid images look like abstract paintings. But look again and you’ll realize that they are actually photographs of earth from space. The satellites used to take these photographs break up the image into ‘spectral bands’, which separate the light (both visible and invisible) into different wavelengths, resulting in these surreal images. NASA has compiled a selection of fascinating photographs of the earth from over the last 40 years into a book entitled, Earth as Art. I don’t know about you, but I’d hang one of these photographs on my wall.

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The Fox Is Black pointed us to a part of the NASA website that has been unknown to us till now: it’s dedicated to the Space Food Systems Laboratory and includes a link to a fascinating photo gallery showing just what culinary delights NASA’s space crew partake in.

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NASA recently released a picture which shows variations in the moon’s gravity field measured by its Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) over three months in 2012. The red zones indicate mass excesses, the blue bits mean mass deficiencies, but really, what we get from looking at this image is is that the moon’s kind of a trippy place to go.

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It boggles the mind sometimes to think about how beautiful the world is. Made possible with data captured in April and October 2012, this composite image from a NASA and National Oceanic and Atmospheric satellite shows us just how great we humans can be when what we do co-exists with nature in the form of ‘city lights, gas flares, auroras, wildfires and reflected moonlight’ mapped as magnificent lights across the United States.

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Photo-journalist Christoph Malin stacked a bunch of NASA’s image sequences from the international Space Station to such magical effect that it makes us want to rewatch 1982’s TRON again. Light cycles are so cool.

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If you’ve ever wanted to spend a cool $11,111 on a coffee machine and still have to push a plunger to get your damn coffee, you now can. Ex-NASA and Apple engineers, Jeremy Kuempel and Matt Walliser, along with designer Joey Roth, are behind this space age unit. The machine, dubbed Blossom One Limited, contains a computer that works to create a coffee specifically to the users’ liking. This includes: temperature, agitation, coffee to water ratio, and even how long the water is in contact with the coffee. Users are also able to scan QR codes and download brew recipes. Sounds pretty cool, but we think we’ll stick with our simple espresso machine.

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Curiosity is diligently trucking away on Mars, and NASA kindly posts all the raw images sent back to Earth online. I am enthralled by the gallery. Some are of Curiosity inspecting itself, but it’s mostly high resolution pictures of the dirt and pebbles of an alien world. It makes Mars feel familiar and tangible, and makes the distance from here to there seem all that greater. Stay tuned, more pictures are being radioed back from 154 million miles away.

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The New Yorker has complied a mind-blowing set of photos from NASA’s archive titled tentalisingly, ‘Space things that look like Earth things.‘ Seriously, Mickey Mouse has colonised Mercury? Should never have canceled our newspaper subscription.

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Way back in the 1970s, NASA used to have all these astoundingly epic conceptual visions of the future, as these artistic renderings show. Here we are, four decades later, where human settlements are still pretty earthbound. But these sci-fi dreams are still worth lusting after.

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Does this count as travel photography? Hopefully one day we’ll all get to experience what a select few astronauts have felt floating up above our blue planet. Until that time, we have their photo mementos instead. Exploring this NASA site isn’t the easiest. And that‘s half the fun. It’s a pure lucky dip. Start in the collections and move onto missions.

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You’ll need to watch this closely to believe what you’re seeing. And what is it you’re seeing, you ask? Well, this is stunning footage of ‘the earth as it’s never been seen before in a combination of time lapse sequences taken from the International Space Station’. Sublime.

The sequences are as follows:
0:01 — Stars over southern United States
0:08 — US west coast to Canada
0:21 — Central Europe to the Middle East
0:36 — Aurora Australis over the Indian Ocean
0:54 — Storms over Africa
1:08 — Central United States
1:20 — Midwest United States
1:33 — United Kingdom to Baltic Sea
1:46 — Moonset
1:55 — Northern United States to Eastern Canada
2:12 — Aurora Australis over the Indian Ocean
2:32 — Comet Lovejoy
2:53 — Aurora Borealis over Hudson Bay
3:06 — United Kingdom to Central Europe.

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Produced by Shadow Play, an independent label based in New York City, each piece is digitally custom-printed with actual images from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. Yes, we agree, this is a great buy for all you astro-lovers out there.

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Constructing Space began when I realised that NASA hand-colour their images of space. Disillusioned, I created my own space images that, like NASA’s, were a little bit truthful and a little bit fake. I paint with light in my darkroom, making colour photograms of 4,565 billion year-old meteorite particles. Their trace on the light sensitive photographic paper creates the stars in my ‘galaxies’. In 2011, a digital copy of one of these photograms went into space on board NASA’s Space Shuttle Endeavour.

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This is HUGE! Ever think are we alone in this universe? Well, maybe we’re not. This new planet has the same structure, atmosphere, and climate as Earth. Here is the press conference. Now, let me know when E.T. gets here.

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