WHEN it comes to illustrating humanity’s achievements in space, NASA’s back catalogue is as good as it gets. The images here are all part of a book tracing the agency’s 60 years of existence using more than 400 photographs.

The big launches, moon landings, starscapes and Martian panoramas all make the cut, alongside plenty of striking views from behind the scenes, images that give a human scale to NASA’s vast technological endeavours.

“Of course, many of the well-known shots were too beautiful to leave out, but we also wanted plenty of lesser-known images, so there was a big effort to delve into obscure archives,” says Piers Bizony, the book’s author and editor.

A big focus is the Apollo project to put people on the moon, as these picture show.

While the book covers decades of effort to reach the great beyond, it also has a message about the stewardship of our home planet. “The fact remains that we cannot relocate 7 billion people,” says Bizony. “Earth has to be our priority in terms of securing a successful future for humanity.”

In another 60 years, hopefully with threats to humanity overcome, someone may trawl NASA’s archives for a sequel. Who knows what they will hold. As Bizony says, maybe there will be images of microbial life on another world or of the spiked pattern of a radio signal from an intelligent extraterrestrial entity.

, edited by Piers Bizony, will be published by Taschen.

THESE intricate solar panels will help unlock the deepest secrets of Mars. They were opened in a test facility at Lockheed Martin’s Space division in Colorado as part of a check of . The craft is due to blast off on its journey to the surface of the Red Planet in May.

If it lands successfully six months later at Elysium Planitia, a plain straddling the Martian equator, there will be a 16-minute pause to let the dust settle before the photovoltaic arrays unfold like delicate Japanese fans. This design minimises mass and volume in flight, but will maximise the panels’ efficacy on Mars, where the sun’s intensity is a third of that on Earth. Both panels are about 2.2 metres in diameter and their solar cells are similar to those used on Earth, but specifically tuned for the limited light on Mars. In optimum conditions there, they will feed 600 to 700 watts of electricity to the craft’s batteries.

That store of energy will be vital to InSight’s two-year mission. Short for Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport, it is a static lab packed with instruments designed to probe the guts of Mars. Because the planet’s interior calmed more rapidly than that of Earth, its ancient internal structures are much better preserved, and will tell us a lot about how the core, mantle and crust of rocky planets form.

Photograph
Lockheed Martin Space

This article appeared in print under the headline “Sun flowers”

DARKNESS in the ChocĂł rainforest of Ecuador holds many surprises, such as this young Andean mouse-opossum (Marmosops impavidus) plucking a crunchy late-night snack from the air.

It was a lucky moment for herpetologist-photographer Lucas Bustamante, if not for the moth being devoured. The marsupial, also known as Tschudi’s slender opossum, fell under the glare of his head torch, which also lured flying insects, creating perfect conditions for a startling image.

So frenzied was the feast that Bustamante was showered in debris. “Moth scales were flying all around me,” he recalls.

He wasn’t actually looking for mammals when he stumbled across this scene; he was searching for frogs, lizards and snakes. Bustamante uses his photography to raise global awareness of amphibians and reptiles, many of them endangered, partnering with conservation groups in Ecuador and around the world to display the rich natural wonders of this place.

The hope is that extinctions can be avoided in habitats like the ChocĂł, which spans Ecuador, Colombia and Panama, and is threatened by logging, gold mining and drug cultivation. It is a treasure trove of life, containing one of the highest concentrations of endemic species anywhere and probably many undiscovered ones. Bustamante hopes to capture more of them on camera soon.

Photographer
Lucas Bustamante

This article appeared in print under the headline “A messy midnight feast”