Pictures of the year: Space

The "Cosmic Cliffs" of the Carina Nebula are seen in an image divided horizontally by an undulating line between a cloudscape forming a nebula along the bottom portion and a comparatively clear upper portion, with data from NASA's James Webb Space...more

NASA's next-generation moon rocket, the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket with the Orion crew capsule, lifts off from launch complex 39-B on the unmanned Artemis 1 mission to the moon, seen from Sebastian, Florida, November 16. REUTERS/Joe Rimkus Jr.

Crewmembers of Blue Origin's New Shepard rocket, Laura Shepard Churchley, daughter of the first American in space Alan Shepard, gets a hug from NFL hall-of-famer Michael Strahan after their flight from Launch Site One in West Texas, December 11....more

A student poses with Mayor Claudia Sheinbaum and Katya Echazarreta, an Electrical Engineer and Engineering/Science Communicator working on NASA missions and the first Mexican-born American ever to fly to space, during an event after she received the...more

An observation of a planetary nebula from the NIRCam instrument of NASA's James Webb Space Telescope released July 12.    NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Webb ERO via REUTERS

The Soyuz MS-20 spacecraft carrying the International Space Station (ISS) crew NASA astronaut Frank Rubio, along with Roscosmos cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitry Petelin, blasts off to the International Space Station (ISS) at...more

Commander Nicole Mann greets her family while departing crew quarters for launch aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, October 5. REUTERS/Joe Skipper

An image captured by NASA's Mars rover Curiosity shows a dark opening on Mars, released May 7. NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket lifts off carrying three NASA astronauts and one ESA astronaut on a six-month expedition to the International Space Station, at Cape Canaveral, Florida, April 27. REUTERS/Steve Nesius

The four commercial crew astronauts representing NASA’s SpaceX Crew-3 mission are pictured in their Dragon spacesuits for a fit check aboard the International Space Station's Harmony module on April 21. From left, are ESA (European Space Agency)...more

Members of a search and rescue team arrive at the Soyuz MS-19 space capsule carrying crew members of the International Space Station (ISS), NASA astronaut Mark Vande Hei and Roscosmos cosmonauts Anton Shkaplerov and Pyotr Dubrov, shortly after...more

The first full-color image from NASA's James Webb Space Telescope shows the galaxy cluster SMACS 0723, known as Webb’s First Deep Field, in a composite made from images at different wavelengths  taken with a Near-Infrared Camera and released July 11....more

Asteroid moonlet Dimorphos as seen by the DART spacecraft 11 seconds before impact in this image taken by DART’s on board DRACO imager from a distance of 68 kilometers, and released September 26. NASA/Johns Hopkins APL

U.S. President Joe Biden applauds upon seeing the first images from the Webb Space Telescope during a briefing from NASA officials at the White House in Washington, July 11. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque

View of M74, otherwise known as the Phantom Galaxy, taken by the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope, released August 29. Webb’s sharp vision reveals delicate filaments of gas and dust in the spiral arms which wind outwards from the center of...more

NASA astronaut Frank Rubio, along with Roscosmos cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitry Petelin, blasts off to the International Space Station (ISS) at the Baikonur Cosmodrome, Kazakhstan, September 21. REUTERS/Maxim Shemetov

The space capsule of Blue Origin's rocket New Shepard, carrying six crew members, is seen before landing, on billionaire Jeff Bezos's company's fourth suborbital tourism flight, near Van Horn, Texas, March 31. REUTERS/Ivan Pierre Aguirre

The first image of Sagittarius A* (or Sgr A* for short), the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy, captured by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), an array which linked together radio observatories across the planet to form a single...more

A SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket side booster lands after launch on its mission with a classified payload for the U.S. Space Force at Cape Canaveral, Florida, November 1. REUTERS/Joe Skipper

An observation of a planetary nebula from the MIRI instrument in the mid-infrared from NASA's James Webb Space Telescope released July 12.    NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Webb ERO via REUTERS

Boulder-sized blocks of water ice are seen around the rim of an impact crater formed December 24, 2021, by a space rock that struck in the Amazonis Planitia region on Mars, as viewed by the High-Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE camera)...more

NASA astronaut Frank Rubio, along with Roscosmos cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitry Petelin, blasts off to the International Space Station (ISS) at the Baikonur Cosmodrome, Kazakhstan, September 21. REUTERS/Maxim Shemetov

NASA's next-generation moon rocket, the Space Launch System (SLS), with its Orion crew capsule on top, sits on the pad early in the morning before the unmanned Artemis 1 mission was scrubbed, at Cape Canaveral, Florida, August 29. REUTERS/Steve...more