The Mississippi River Valley has been experiencing record floods after a series of storms brought heavy rains to the region in late December 2015. The torrential rainfall pushed some parts of the Mississippi River and its tributaries to record-high levels, particularly for the time of year.
Near the 47th anniversary of the iconic Earthrise image captured by Apollo 8 astronauts while they orbited the Moon on Dec. 24, 1968, the modern Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera (LROC) broadcast new images that show a similar scene, with the Moon in the foreground and the distant Earth in the background.
On Nov. 5, 2015, an iron-ore tailings dam in Bento Rodrigues, a subdistrict of Mariana, Brazil, suffered a catastrophic failure, causing flooding and at least 13 deaths.
Bordered by the North Sea to the north and west, Germany to the east, and Belgium to the south, The Netherlands has a population of 17 million. With more than 400 people per square kilometer, it's one of the most-densely populated countries in the world.
Originally launched in 1995 by the European Space Agency (ESA) and NASA to study the sun and its influence out to the edges of the solar system, the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) revolutionized heliophysics, providing the basis for nearly 5,000 scientific papers.
As a reminder that spring is relative depending on Earth's hemisphere, phytoplankton blooms, which were especially troublesome in the northern hemisphere's 2015 spring, have now been spotted via satellite in the southern hemisphere's spring.
Sentinel-2A, which has been in orbit since June 2105, captured this false-color image of Qingdao, China.
The European Space Agency's Mars Express satellite has been able to detect ultraviolet auroras on the planet by combining remote observations with in situ measurements of electrons hitting the atmosphere, and a new study looks at 10 years of such observations.
In October 2015, a system of storms caused significant flooding in most of California's Death Valley National Park. Flash floods from the storm destroyed roads and utilities, and damaged several historical structures.
Having reached the halfway mark of his latest one-year mission and overall logging a record-breaking time in space approaching 400 days, U.S. astronaut and commander of the current Expedition 45 crew Scott Kelly has been dazzling audiences with beautiful pictures taken from beyond Earth's atmosphere. He recently photographed the Nile River during a nighttime flyover on Sept. 22, 2015.
