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Discovery ride along!
A camera was mounted in the front of space shuttle Discovery's flight deck looking back at the astronauts during launch. This video shows the final minutes of the countdown and the ride to space with the live launch audio included. The movie shows what it would be like to launch on the shuttle with the STS-121 crew.
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Shuttle from the air
A high-altitude WB-57 aircraft flying north of Discovery's launch trajectory captures this incredible aerial footage of the space shuttle's ascent from liftoff through solid rocket booster separation.
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Launch experience
This is the full launch experience! The movie begins with the final readiness polls of the launch team. Countdown clocks then resume ticking from the T-minus 9 minute mark, smoothly proceeding to ignition at 2:38 p.m. Discovery rockets into orbit, as seen by ground tracker and a video camera mounted on the external tank. About 9 minutes after liftoff, the engines shut down and the tank is jettisoned as the shuttle arrives in space.
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Boosting Enceladus' signal
CASSINI PHOTO RELEASE Posted: August 10, 2006
Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
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The ice jets of Enceladus send particles streaming into space hundreds of kilometers above the south pole of this spectacularly active moon. Some of the particles escape to form the diffuse E ring around Saturn.
This color-coded image was processed to enhance faint signals, making the contours and extent of the fainter, larger-scale component of the plume easier to see.
The bright strip behind and above Enceladus (505 kilometers, 314 miles across) is the E ring, in which this intriguing body resides. The small round object at far left is a background star.
The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera at a distance of approximately 1.9 million kilometers (1.2 million miles) from Enceladus and at a Sun-Enceladus-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 162 degrees. Image scale is 11 kilometers (7 miles) per pixel.
The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging operations center is based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.
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