NASA recently published a photo gallery, showing exquisite images of the International Space Station (ISS), Earth’s largest artificial satellite, with Space Shuttle Endeavour docked to it. The picutres were obtained aboard the Russian Soyuz TMA-20 spacecraft, which was flying close to the ISS, orbiting at an altitude of about 350 km.
The gallery can be browsed at:
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/multimedia/e27depart.html
Soyuz TMA-20 was a manned space mission to the ISS, as part of the Soyuz program. It launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, on 15 December 2010, and arrived at the ISS, and docked with it, two days later. The Soyuz TMA-20 remained docked to ISS, for 157 days. On 23 May 2011, it separated the ISS.
On 24 May 2011, Soyuz TMA-20 landed safely in Zhezkazgan, Kazakhstan. The three crewmembers of Soyuz TMA-20, Dmitri Kondratyev, Catherine Coleman and Paolo Nespoli, represented, respectively, three space organizations: Russia’s Roscosmos, NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA).
References
NASA
www.nasa.gov/
Wikipedia