ISS astronauts share awesome glimpses of Earth from space

Fascinating photographs of Earth were shared by International Space Station (ISS) astronauts who have been filming the planet from space. Expedition 50 Commander Shane Kimbrough himself has been sharing amazing footages while in space.

European Space Agency astronaut Thomas Pesquet, a flight engineer for Expeditions 50 and 51 , has also been sharing stunning views of coastlines and cities. Among the snaps he has posted on social media are places like Bonn and Karlsruhe along the river Rhine in Germany, and also Tahaa and Raiatea in French Polynesia.

Pesquet stated that there were times, when looking out the window, that the best view he could find was not on Earth but on the ISS itself. He shared a photograph, for instance, of the robotic arm casting a shadow on the solar array while the space station was shrouded in darkness.

NASA has been updating the public on details about Expedition 50. Through time-lapse videos and snaps posted on social media, the world watched as Commander Kimbrough and Flight Engineer Peggy Whitson of NASA mark a historic moment conducting spacewalks in late March.

The Expedition 50 crew members performed routine maintenance throughout December and then worked in tandem with external robotics to instal six new lithium-ion batteries on the station at the start of 2017. Commander Kimbrough and Whitson had also installed thermal protection shields on the Tranquility module of the ISS, NASA reported on its website.

Things do not always go as planned, particularly in space. One of the shields got lost, but the two astronauts went on to successfully instal the remaining shields on the common berthing mechanism port.

A plan was devised by a team from the Mission Control Center at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, helping the astronauts finish their task. It is a multilayered team that comes together to solve problems, and in a recent case, work had to be done incredibly quickly. Congratulatory messages were sent to the ground team for replanning rapidly.

In other news, Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield recently shared an image that he captioned "cold desert world" on Twitter. NASA stated in its press release that solar winds and radiation have been stripping the warm, wet Martian atmosphere.

The result is “a frigid desert world” as shown from results of NASA’s MAVEN (Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution Mission) spacecraft. The team ascertained that most of the gas present in the Martian atmosphere -- an estimated 65 percent argon -- was lost to space.