Astronaut Dale A. Gardner holding up a “for sale” sign in 1984
If you need to escape Earth for a moment, NASA has just the right panacea. The agency recently launched a new online database of over 140,000 images, videos, and audio files that document its history, from space missions to in-house experiments. Easily searchable, the trove consolidates over 60 visual collections in one location and includes both new and historic images, such as views from the Apollo 11 journey.
There’s enough beauty here to make you cry, from images of gleaming auroras to crisp captures of planets. Not all them are celestial, with plenty of behind-the-scenes glimpses of laboratory work and test runs back here on our blue planet. You’ll even find some space-related art, including concept renderings, retrofuturistic visions, and contemporary works such as Paul Henry Ramirez’s “Stardust” (2007) — an homage to its eponymous mission, made of cometary material — and EV Day’s “Wheel of Optimism” (2006) — which imagines a Martian world with organic plant life.
NASA will continually update the database with archival records and its most recent images, which, as a nice bonus, are almost all in the public domain.
Moon crossing the face of the earth
Sizzling remains of a dead star, taken by NASA Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array, or NuSTAR
Hubble Space Telescope’s capture of auroras in Jupiter’s atmosphere in 2016
1979 photo of Jupiter by Voyager 1 spacecraft from over 25 million miles away
Space shuttle reentry art
Moon mission artwork from the Johnson Space Center collection
1975 NASA art by artist Rick Guidice imagining space colonization
Oil painting depicting the storms of Jupiter, the satellite Io, and the Great Red Spot
Technicians in 1971 examine the largest lunar rock sample collected by Apollo 14 crewmen.
A safety poster produced by artists on the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics during World War II
Skylab food-heating and serving tray with food, drink, and utensils
View of a bag of asparagus and garlic paste about to be rehydrated, documented by the Expedition 36 crew
