The TRACE spacecraft observes a massive X-ray flare over solar active region AR9906, April 21, 2002.
The Z Machine running at Sandia National Laboratories created a plasma that was unexpectedly hot. The plasma reached a temperature in excess of two billion Kelvin, making it arguably the hottest human-made thing ever in the history of the Earth and, for a brief time, hotter than the interiors of stars. The Z Machine experiment, pictured here, purposely creates high temperatures by focusing 20 million amps of electricity into a small region further confined by a magnetic field.
This Apollo 8 reentry photograph was taken by a U.S. Air Force ALOTS (Airborne Lightweight Optical Tracking System) camera mounted on a KC-135A aircraft flown at 40,000 feet. Apollo 8 splashed down at 10:15 a.m., December 27, 1968, in the central Pacific approximately 1,000 miles South-Southwest of Hawaii.
This starting test of the J-33 jet engine was performed to study flame propagation at ignition in 1948.
The solid rocket booster on Space Shuttle Discovery expends a column of flame as it hurtles into the sky on mission STS-105 to the International Space Station in 2001.
This image of SN 1987A, taken November 28, 2003 by the Advanced Camera for Surveys aboard NASA's Hubble Space Telescope (HST), shows many bright spots along a ring of gas, like pearls on a necklace. These cosmic pearls are being produced as superior shock waves unleashed during an explosion slam into the ring at more than a million miles per hour.
Extending above the photosphere or visible surface of the Sun, the faint, tenuous solar corona can't be easily seen from Earth, but it is measured to be hundreds of times hotter than the photosphere itself. What makes the solar corona so hot? Images like these indicate that most of the heating occurs low in the corona, near the bases of the loops as they emerge from and return to the solar surface. The new results confound the conventional theory which relies on heating the loops uniformly.
NASA's Space Infrared Telescope Facility (SIRTF) lifts off from Launch Pad 17-B, Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, on Aug. 25, 1983. SIRTF will obtain images and spectra by detecting the infrared energy, or heat, radiated by objects in space.
This is a Hubble Space Telescope image of a vast nebula called NGC 604, which lies in the neighboring spiral galaxy M33, located 2.7 million light-years away in the constellation Triangulum. This is a site where new stars are being born in a spiral arm of the galaxy. Though such nebulae are common in galaxies, this one is particularly large, nearly 1,500 light-years across. The nebula is so vast it is easily seen in ground-based telescopic images. At the heart of NGC 604 are over 200 hot stars, much more massive than our Sun, which heat the gaseous walls of the nebula making the gas fluoresce.
Big cities influence the environment around them. For example, urban areas are typically warmer than their surroundings. Cities are strikingly visible in computer models that simulate the Earth's land surface. This visualization shows latent heat flux predicted by the Land Information System (LIS) for a day in June 2001. Latent heat flux is lower in the cities because there is less evaporation there. Only part of the global computation is shown, focusing on the highly urbanized northeast corridor in the United States, including the cities of Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington.
This is an image taken by International Space Station NASA Science Officer and Flight Engineer John Phillips of the Space Shuttle Discovery as it approached the Station and peformed a backflip to allow photography of its heat shield. The photos would be analyzed by engineers on the ground as additional data to evaluate the condition of Discovery's heat shield.
A sample of aerogel, a low density material made from silicon dioxide, is suspended above a flame. The aerogel is protecting some crayons from the heat of the flame. Aerogels have primarily been used in scientific applications, most commonly as a particle detector in high energy physics. Dr. Peter Tsou has used the material for particle dust capture experiments aboard the space shuttle and the MIR space station. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory also uses aerogel as thermal insulation on the Sojourner rover and as a dust collector on the Stardust mission to comet Wild-2.
Under Europa's icy surface are vast extraterrestrial oceans. This conceptual animation depicts simulated heat transport of these subsurface oceans. Please note that the simulated heat transport in this animation is only conceptual.
This image from the panoramic camera on NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity shows remains of the heat shield that protected the spacecraft as it barreled through the martian atmosphere. The image was taken on the rover's 325th martian day, or sol in 2004.
The largest solar flare ever recorded occurred on Monday, April 2, 2001. as observed by the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) satellite. Solar flares, among the solar system's mightiest eruptions, are tremendous explosions in the atmosphere of the Sun, capable of releasing as much energy as a billion megatons of TNT.
Mercury spacecraft #6 heat shield clearly shows the effects of re-entry heat as it is hoisted aboard the recovery ship downrange after the Mercury-Atlas 2 flight.
A crippling heat wave and strong winds in southeastern Australia contributed to an outbreak of forest and grassland fires in Victoria in late January 2009. By January 30, about 5,500 hectares had burned and at least 10 homes had been destroyed, reported the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC). The homes were located in a small community near the town of Boolara. Nearly surrounded by wildfire, the town had also run out of water and lost power, said ABC News. This image from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA's Aqua satellite was captured on January 30.
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