Space photos of 2022: Mars, black holes, planetary nebulas and rocket launches

NASA's next-generation moon rocket, the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket with the Orion crew capsule, lifts off from launch complex 39-B on the unmanned Artemis 1 mission to the moon, seen from Sebastian, Florida, November 16, 2022.

The 'Cosmic Cliffs' of the Carina Nebula are seen in an image divided horizontally by an undulating line between a cloudscape forming a nebula along the bottom portion and a comparatively clear upper portion, with data from NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, released July 12, 2022. Speckled across both portions is a starfield, showing innumerable stars of many sizes.

Crewmembers of Blue Origin's New Shepard rocket, Laura Shepard Churchley, daughter of the first American in space Alan Shepard, gets a hug from NFL hall-of-famer Michael Strahan after their flight from Launch Site One in West Texas, December 11, 2022.

An observation of a planetary nebula from the NIRCam instrument of NASA's James Webb Space Telescope released July 12, 2022.

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket lifts off carrying three NASA astronauts and one ESA astronaut on a six-month expedition to the International Space Station, at Cape Canaveral, Florida, April 27, 2022.

The first full-color image from NASA's James Webb Space Telescope shows the galaxy cluster SMACS 0723, known as Webb’s First Deep Field, in a composite made from images at different wavelengths taken with a Near-Infrared Camera and released July 11, 2022.

Asteroid moonlet Dimorphos as seen by the DART spacecraft 11 seconds before impact in this image taken by DART’s on board DRACO imager from a distance of 68 kilometers, and released September 26, 2022.

US President Joe Biden applauds upon seeing the first images from the Webb Space Telescope during a briefing from NASA officials at the White House in Washington, July 11, 2022.

View of M74, otherwise known as the Phantom Galaxy, taken by the NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope, released August 29. Webb’s sharp vision reveals delicate filaments of gas and dust in the spiral arms which wind outwards from the center of this image.

The first image of Sagittarius A* (or Sgr A* for short), the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy, captured by the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), an array which linked together radio observatories across the planet to form a single "Earth-sized" virtual telescope. The new view captures light bent by the powerful gravity of the black hole, which is four million times more massive than our Sun.

Boulder-sized blocks of water ice are seen around the rim of an impact crater formed December 24, 2021, by a space rock that struck in the Amazonis Planitia region on Mars, as viewed by the High-Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE camera) aboard NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

NASA's next-generation moon rocket, the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket with the Orion crew capsule, lifts off from launch complex 39-B on the unmanned Artemis1 mission to the moon at Cape Canaveral, Florida, U.S. November 16, 2022.