On Aug. 9, 2021, ESA/NASA's Solar Orbiter spacecraft passed within 4,967 miles (7,995 kilometers) of the surface of planet Venus. In the days leading up to the approach, the Solar Orbiter Heliospheric Imager, or SoloHI, telescope captured this gleaming view of the planet.

The images show Venus approaching from the left while the Sun is off camera to the upper right. The planet's nightside, the part hidden from the Sun, appears as a dark semicircle surrounded by a bright crescent of light – glare from Venus' incredibly bright sunlit side.

"Ideally, we would have been able to resolve some features on the nightside of the planet, but there was just too much signal from the dayside." said Phillip Hess, astrophysicist at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C. "Only a sliver of the dayside appears in the images, but it reflects enough sunlight to cause the bright crescent and the diffracted rays that seem to come from the surface."

Two bright stars are also visible in the background early in the sequence, before being eclipsed by the planet.

As NASA prepares for its "next giant leap"—meaning astronauts on Mars—technology developed by Austin-based 3D printing construction company Icon is helping pave the way.

Icon has landed a subcontract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and is teaming with Bjarke Ingels Group, to construct and design a habitation unit that will help the space agency better understand how people may be able to live on Mars in the future.

The company is building a 3D printed structure at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston for a series of missions designed to simulate what life could look like for astronauts living on Mars. Once completed, crews will stay in the structure at the Houston space center for one-year stints designed to mimic living conditions on the red planet.

Icon, which printed its first home using 3D technology in 2018, was co-founded by Jason Ballard with the goal of reimagining construction and housebuilding by using novel building techniques to make homes more affordable, resilient and sustainable. The startup has built a number of projects on Earth and has been working to take its technology to new heights by aiming to construct some of the first habitable structures in space.

With recent forays into space travel by business moguls like Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson, visiting the edge of space has never been more within the grasp of commercial travel. However, at these altitudes, passengers experience weightlessness, or more generally, altered gravity, that can affect the body's normal physiology.

In a study, Texas A&M University researchers have used a simulation-based approach to accurately predict the effects of altered gravity on an individual-by-individual basis. Their approach precludes the need for simultaneously testing hundreds of parameters for estimating the cardiovascular state of an individual; rather, it focuses on a handful of significant factors, increasing accuracy and saving time.

"Understanding human physiological responses in altered gravity environments becomes absolutely necessary if we want to push toward new frontiers in space travel," said Dr. Ana Diaz-Artiles, assistant professor in the Department of Aerospace Engineering. "But no two people are alike, and we need to develop tools to individualize physiological predictions quickly and precisely. Our study addresses that gap."

The researchers have reported the results of their study in The Journal of Applied Physiology.