The agency has named Kirk Shireman as the new manager of its global Space Station (ISS) Program, based at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, where Shireman has served as deputy center director since 2013.
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Since Suffredini became program manager in 2005, the space station has evolved to become the jumping-off point for NASA’s next giant leap in exploration, enabling research and technology developments that will benefit human and robotic exploration of destinations beyond low-Earth orbit, including asteroids and Mars.
At the time of writing (6.45pm) the space station is now over South America and will orbit the Earth twice more at five miles per second before it crosses the Atlantic Ocean towards the United Kingdom. 82 seconds to snap the shots as the tiny silhouette of the space station passed by. Ingalls wrote on Twitter, where he posts his photography as @ingallsimages. You can see those images and more of Ingalls’ lunar transit photos on NASA’s Flickr page NASAHQPhoto. Fleeting moment days after uncommon Blue Moon.
Not only do you need utterly ideal night sky conditions, you have to be ready to snap the picture with hair-trigger timing.
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Bill Ingalls is NASA’s favorite photographer. It gets even better when you remember there are six people on board the station, which looks utterly dwarfed by the moon and its stark craters. The latter are Gennady Padalka, Mikhail Kornienko and Oleg Kononenko, NASA astronauts Scott Joseph Kelly and Kjell Lindgren, and the Japanese Kimiya Yui.
