Bound for orbit
Space Shuttle Atlantis and its six-member STS-132 crew head toward Earth orbit and a rendezvous with the International Space Station. Liftoff was at 2:20 p.m. local time on May 14, 2010, from launch pad 39A at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida.
Mission accomplished
Soviet spacecraft Soyuz TM-26 had just undocked from the Russian space station Mir when the pictures this stereo view was derived from were taken, on Feb. 19, 1998. Cosmonauts Anatoly Solovyev and Pavel Vinogradov were on board, together with French astronaut Léopold Eyharts. Solovyev and Vinogradov had just accomplished their mission to perform emergency repairs to save Mir after a collision with Progress, a Russian cargo spacecraft.
Epilogue to the lunar missions
Decades after NASA astronauts snapped stereo images of the moon, musician and astrophysicist Brian May assembled the first ever 3-D close-up of Pluto, in the control room of the New Horizons mission just a few minutes after the second of these digitally transmitted views arrived back on Earth. The New Horizons probe was already speeding on towards the Kuiper Belt.
