Credits: Writer/Narrator: Brian McManus Editor: Dylan Hennessy Animator: Mike Ridolfi (https://www.moboxgraphics.com/​) Sound: Graham Haerther (https://haerther.net/​)

The men and women who live and work on the International Space Station take thousands of photographs of their home planet every year, and we asked the folks at the Earth Science and Remote Sensing Unit at NASA’s Johnson Space Center for a few of their favorites from 2020. Here are the top 20 from ’20, and you can check out the images for yourself at the Gateway to Astronaut Photography of Earth(https://eol.jsc.nasa.gov/):

NASA's Mars 2020 Perseverance mission captured thrilling footage of its rover landing in Mars' Jezero Crater on Feb. 18, 2021. The real footage in this video was captured by several cameras that are part of the rover's entry, descent, and landing suite. The views include a camera looking down from the spacecraft's descent stage (a kind of rocket-powered jet pack that helps fly the rover to its landing site), a camera on the rover looking up at the descent stage, a camera on the top of the aeroshell (a capsule protecting the rover) looking up at that parachute, and a camera on the bottom of the rover looking down at the Martian surface. The audio embedded in the video comes from the mission control call-outs during entry, descent, and landing.

ending the first Artemis mission to the Moon in preparation for human missions, landing a new rover on Mars, and launching the James Webb Space Telescope into space, expanding our ability to see deep into the universe, are just a few of the things NASA has planned for 2021. To learn more about the missions mentioned in this video, take a deep dive into these links: To the Moon [00:12] Space Launch System: https://www.nasa.gov/sls Artemis I: https://www.nasa.gov/artemis Commercial Lunar Payload Services: https://www.nasa.gov/clps Human Landing System: https://www.nasa.gov/content/humans-o... Artemis Accords: https://www.nasa.gov/artemisaccords Exploring Beyond [00:47] Perseverance: https://www.nasa.gov/perseverance MOXIE: https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/spacec... Ingenuity: https://mars.nasa.gov/technology/heli... James Webb Space Telescope: https://www.nasa.gov/jwst DART: https://www.nasa.gov/dart LUCY: https://www.nasa.gov/lucy Landsat 9: https://landsat.gsfc.nasa.gov/landsat... Humans in Space [1:38] International Space Station: https://www.nasa.gov/iss Commercial Crew: https://www.nasa.gov/commercialcrew Astronaut Candidates: https://www.nasa.gov/astronauts Space Technology [2:07] CAPSTONE: https://www.nasa.gov/directorates/spa... Laser Communications Relay Demonstration: https://www.nasa.gov/spacetech Pioneering Flight [2:28] X-57 Maxwell: https://www.nasa.gov/aero Advanced Air Mobility: https://www.nasa.gov/aero X-59 QUESST: https://www.nasa.gov/subject/7565/fut... Producer/Editor: Lacey Young Music: Universal Production Music