An H-2A rocket carrying Japan's fourth and final quasi-zenith satellite, the Michibiki No. 4, lifts off from the Tanegashima Space Center in Kagoshima Prefecture, southwestern Japan in this photo taken by Kyodo on October 10, 2017. (Photo by Reuters/Kyodo News)

Kim Kardashian west and Madonna backstage at MDNA SKIN hosts Madonna and Kim Kardashian West for a beauty conversation at YouTube Space LA on March 6, 2018 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for Madonna's MDNA SKIN)

Mickey McCooper, born 1972 as Michel Valentino in Stuttgart-Germany, is a photo-artist, filmmaker, painter, and media-entrepreneur. He is well known for the broad range of subject matter he is able to interpret, he is widely recognized for his unusual people portraiture, his editorial photography, his photo illustrations, photographic design and his extraordinary repertoire of art photography, painings and drawings.

Photo: Space Invaders, 2011. (Photo by Mickey McCooper)

Members of the LSU Golden Girls dance team sit spaced apart wearing masks, under COVID-19 restrictions, requiring social distancing and masks, before an NCAA college football game between the LSU and the Mississippi State in Baton Rouge, La., Saturday, September 26, 2020. (Photo by Gerald Herbert/AP Photo)

Youths pose for a photo, while doing their homework in an area once home to chop houses, where gangs dismembered enemies, but is now a “humanitarian space” in Buenaventura, Colombia, Wednesday, August 16, 2023. (Photo by Fernando Vergara/AP Photo)

A woman dressed in an alien space suit carries an American flag and a sign that reads “Women's Revolution 1971” as she marches in a Women's Liberation demonstration on Fifth Avenue in New York, August 26, 1971. (Photo by Marty Lederhandler/AP Photo)

China has sent its first woman into space on a mission to dock with an orbiting station, the latest step in an ambitious programme to go to the moon and on to Mars.

Photo: China's first female astronaut Liu Yang, waves during a sending off ceremony before she departs for the Shenzhou 9 spacecraft rocket launch pad at the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in Jiuquan, China, Saturday, June 16, 2012. China will send its first woman and two other astronauts into space Saturday to work on a temporary space station for about a week, in a key step toward becoming only the third nation to set up a permanent base in orbit. (Photo by Ng Han Guan/AP Photo)

Penitentes, or nieves penitentes (Spanish for “penitent-shaped snows”), are a snow formation found at high altitudes. They take the form of tall thin blades of hardened snow or ice, closely spaced with the blades oriented towards the general direction of the sun.