2013: The Year in Space (52 images)

The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) flying aboard NASA's Aqua satellite acquired this true-color image of a large phytoplankton bloom in the Norwegian Sea, off of Iceland, on July 6, 2013. The waters off Iceland rank among the world's most productive fisheries. The reason for the abundance is an ample supply of phytoplankton, the base of the marine food chain. Like any plant, microscopic phytoplankton need sunlight and nutrients to survive. Iceland's coastal waters offer both during the long days of summer. UPI/J.Schmaltz/NASA

The spinning vortex of Saturn's north polar storm resembles a deep red rose of giant proportions surrounded by green foliage in this false-color image from NASA's Cassini spacecraft. Measurements have sized the eye at a staggering 1,250 miles (2,000 kilometers) across with cloud speeds as fast as 330 miles per hour (150 meters per second). This image is among the first sunlit views of Saturn's north pole captured by Cassini's imaging cameras. It was taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Nov. 27, 2012, using a combination of spectral filters sensitive to wavelengths of near-infrared light. The images filtered at 890 nanometers are projected as blue. The images filtered at 728 nanometers are projected as green, and images filtered at 752 nanometers are projected as red. In this scheme, red indicates low clouds and green indicates high ones. Image scale is 1 mile (2 kilometers) per pixel. NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute/UPI

This is the spiral galaxy NGC 3185, located some 80 million light-years away from us in the constellation of Leo (The Lion). The image shows the galaxy's spiral arms, which can be traced from the center of the galaxy out towards the rim, where they appear to meet a sparkling blue disc. At the center of NGC 3185 is a small but very bright nucleus containing a supermassive black hole. Black holes like this one can have masses many thousands of times that of the Sun, and they become active when matter falls towards them. When this happens the black hole lights up, sending away streams of particles and radiation at almost the speed of light. NGC 3185 is a member of a small, four-galaxy group called Hickson 44, which is also home to another spiral galaxy called NGC 3190. NGC 3190 may be very familiar to you; the technology giant Apple Inc. used a blue-tinted image of it as a desktop image for one of its operating systems. UPI/NASA

Two suborbital rockets were successfully launched 15 seconds apart at the NASA Wallops Flight Facility off the coast of Virginia, the morning of July 4, 2013. As part of a study of electrical currents in the ionosphere, the project is designed to study a global electrical current called the dynamo, which sweeps through the ionosphere..The first rocket carried a payload that collected data on the neutral and charged particles in the ionosphere. The second rocket released a long trail of lithium gas to track how the upper atmospheric wind varies with altitude. These winds are believed to be the drivers of the dynamo currents. UPI/J. Eggers/ NASA