US News & World Report

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SpaceX's Dragon capsule sits on a barge after being retrieved from the Pacific Ocean. The recovery marks a successful end to the first mission by a commercial company to resupply the International Space Station.

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NASA's Mars Rover Opportunity catches its own late-afternoon shadow in this dramatically lit view eastward across Endeavour Crater on Mars.

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A brightly reflective Enceladus appears before Saturn's rings, while the planet's larger moon Titan looms in the distance.

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This massive, young stellar grouping, called R136, is only a few million years old and resides in the 30 Doradus Nebula, a turbulent star-birth region in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way. There is no known star-forming region in the Milky Way Galaxy as large or as prolific as 30 Doradus.

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The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has spotted the "UFO Galaxy." NGC 2683 is a spiral galaxy seen almost edge-on, giving it the shape of a classic science fiction spaceship. While a bird's eye view lets us see the detailed structure of a galaxy, a side-on view has its own perks. In particular, it gives astronomers a great opportunity to see the delicate dusty lanes of the spiral arms silhouetted against the golden haze of the galaxy’s core.

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Baby stars are creating chaos 1,500 light-years away in the cosmic cloud of the Orion Nebula. Four massive stars make up the bright yellow area in the center of this false-color image for NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. Green indicates hydrogen and sulfur gas in the nebula, which is a cocoon of gas and dust. Red and orange indicate carbon-rich molecules. Infant stars appear as yellow dots embedded in the nebula.

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The Hubble Space Telescope has produced the most detailed image so far of Messier 9, a globular star cluster located close to the center of the galaxy. This ball of stars is too faint to see with the naked eye, yet Hubble can see over 250,000 individual stars shining in it.

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The Northern Lights are seen in the skies near Faskusfjordur, Iceland. A solar storm shook the Earth's magnetic field on March 9, 2012, but scientists said they had no reports of any problems with electrical systems. After early reports of the storm fizzling out, a surge of activity prompted space weather forecasters to issue alerts about changes in the magnetic field.

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An impressive solar flare.

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NASA's Hubble Telescope captured an image of Eta Carinae. The larger of the two stars in the Eta Carinae system is a huge and unstable star that is nearing the end of its life, and the event that the 19th century astronomers observed was a stellar near-death experience. Scientists call these outbursts supernova impostor events, because they appear similar to supernovae but stop just short of destroying their star.

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Saturn's largest moon, Titan, looks small here, pictured to the right of the gas giant in this Cassini spacecraft view. Saturn's rings appear across the top of the image, and they cast a series of shadows onto the planet across the middle of the image.

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The twin Grail spacecraft maps the lunar gravity field. Launched from Cape Canaveral on Sept. 10, 2011, the spacecraft entered lunar orbit around New Year's weekend. The twin probes began collecting data Tuesday, March 6, 2012.

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Craters appear well defined on icy Rhea in front of the hazy orb of the much larger moon Titan in this Cassini spacecraft view of these two Saturn moons.

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Aurora Borealis is seen above the Midwestern U.S., photographed from the International Space Station.

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This remnant of Supernova Vital is located some 14,700 light years from the Earth toward the center of the Milky Way. These photos give scientists clues about the devastating ends to the lives of massive stars.

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NASA scientists working in Antarctica discovered a massive crack across the Pine Island Glacier, a major ice stream that drains the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. Extending for 19 miles, the crack was 260 feet wide and 195 feet deep. Eventually, the crack will extend all the way across the glacier, and calve a giant iceberg that will cover about 350 square miles.

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The line of Saturn's rings disrupts the Cassini spacecraft's view of the moons Tethys and Titan. Titan is on the left. Tethys is near the center of the image.

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The International Space Station can be seen as a small object in in the skies over the Houston, Texas area. The space station can occasionally be seen in the night sky with the naked eye and a pair of field binoculars.

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This artist's concept depicts a tiny planetary system -- so compact, in fact, that it's more like Jupiter and its moons than a star and its planets. Astronomers using data from NASA's Kepler mission and ground-based telescopes recently confirmed that the system, called KOI-961, hosts the three smallest exoplanets known so far to orbit a star other than our sun. An exoplanet is a planet that resides outside of our solar system.

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A huge storm churning through the atmosphere in Saturn's northern hemisphere overtakes itself as it encircles the planet. This picture was taken about 12 weeks after the storm began, and the clouds by this time had formed a tail that wrapped around the planet.

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This computer-generated view depicts part of Mars at the boundary between darkness and daylight, with an area including Gale Crater beginning to catch morning light.

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The giant asteroid Vesta.

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Puppis A is the remnant of a supernova explosion, which was formed when a massive star ended its life in an extremely bright and powerful explosion. The expanding shock waves from that explosion are heating up the dust and gas clouds surrounding the supernova, causing them to glow and creating the beautiful red cloud we see.