For a government organization trying to bring us into the space age, NASA’s web design hasn’t always been up with the times. A new update streamlines the databases logging documentation distributed across all 10 of NASA’s field centers dating back to its creation in 1958. Now you can search for the exact photo you’re looking for, from the moon landing to the latest pics of Titan, without having to be know in advance whether you have to look in the Kennedy Space Center’s archives or the Jet Propulsion Lab’s.
We found a number of gorgeous space photos and artist renditions of celestial phenomena while exploring this new digital frontier, but some of the most interesting images are of the humans and machines that make up NASA itself. Trolling the search function led us to Russian Cosmonaut Gennady Padalka, who, while handsome in Earth gravity, looks like he could oust Giorgio A. Tsoukalos as the new “Aliens” meme. His picture is the only thing that comes up when you search the site for “UFO.” There are race car drivers, crystals forming in microgravity, a moon that looks like the Death Star (that is a moon!), this robotic astronaut, HoloLens experiments, and one incident in 1973 where a Skylab team left a fake corpse for the following astronauts to find when they arrived.
Videos by VICE
Dummy left behind by Skylab 3 crew for the Skylab 4 crew
The updated site offers plenty of stunning photos of nebulas, supernovas, star systems, galaxies, etc. for desktop backgrounds and screen savers, but if you have a few moments go gonzo on the search bar and let us know what interesting moments you find on Twitter.
Check out a few of our favorites below:
NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute, Circling Satellites, 2007
GSFC, Into the Depths of the Lagoon Nebula, 2011
JPL, Flying by the Death, 2010. In this view captured by NASA Cassini spacecraft on its closest-ever flyby of Saturn moon Mimas, large Herschel Crater dominates Mimas, making the moon look like the Death Star in the movie Star Wars.
GSFC, The Twin Jet Nebula, 2015
JPL/NASA/UCLA/William K. Hartmann, Hartmann Background, 2007
NASA/JPL-Caltech/Roma Tre Univ., NuSTAR View of Galaxy NGC 1068, 2015
NASA/JPL-Caltech, North America Nebula in Different Lights, 2011
GSFC, Behemoth Black Hole Found in an Unlikely Place, 2016
NASA/ESA, Quasar Drenched in Water Vapor Artist Concept, 2012
NASA/JPL-Caltech/Univ.of Ariz., Comets Kick up Dust in Helix Nebula, 2007
NASA/JPL-Caltech, Black Holes: Monsters in Space Artist Concept Download, 2013
Embark on 2017: A Search Odyssey in NASA’s huge image database here.
Related:
We Talked to the Artist Behind Space’s First Native Sculpture
NASA’s New Exoplanet Posters Have Us Booking Rockets to Trappist-1
Astronauts, Artists, and Architects Designed a Temple on the Moon
