NASA Voyager 1 Encounters ‘magnetic highway’ in Deep Space

NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft has entered a new region at the remote reaches of our solar system that scientists refer to as a magnetic highway for charged particles because our Sun’s magnetic field outlines are linked to interstellar magnetic field lines.Scientists feel this new region is the last area the spacecraft has to cross before reaching interstellar space. This link allows lower-energy charged particles that start from within our heliosphere, or the bubble of charged particles the Sun...

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Hubble space telescope helps discover most remote galaxy

Astronomers have revealed what is probably the most remote galaxy yet seen in the Universe by combining the power of the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope and one of nature’s zoom lenses. The object offers a glance back into a time when the world was only 3% of its present age of 13.7 billion years.We see the recently discovered galaxy, named MACS0647-JD, as it was 420 million years after the Big Bang. Its light has travelled for 13.3 billion years to reach Earth,...

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NASA's Cassini Space Probe at Saturn celebrates 15 years in space

NASA’s Cassini spacecraft marked 15 years in space Monday (Oct. 15), and the well-traveled probe won’t prevent studying Saturn and its many moons anytime soon.Cassini has logged more than 3.8 billion miles since its launch on Oct. 15, 1997, researchers said. The spacecraft has made many contributions since arriving at Saturn in July 2004, including discovering water-ice geysers on the moon Escalades and snapping the primary views of the hydrocarbon lakes on Saturn’s biggest moon Titan.During...

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NASA's Space Launch System rejoice: Powering Forward

NASA is powering ahead toward a brand new destinations in the solar system. This week marks one year of development since the formation of the Space Launch System (SLS), the nation's next pace in human examination efforts.On Sept. 14, 2011, NASA announced a new ability for America's space program: a heavy-lift rocket planned to take the Orion spacecraft and send astronauts beyond into space than still before. And now, one year afterward, NASA has made swift development improving on existing...

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NASA's traveler 'dancing on edge' of outer space

In a lecture marking the approaching 35th centenary of the Voyager project, Ed Stone said it could be "days, months or years" before it lastly breaks into interstellar space.Earlier this year a surge in a key pointer fueled hopes that the craft was nearing the so-called heliopause, which inscription the limit between our solar system and external space. Scientists were intrigued in May by an enlarge in cosmic waves hitting the spacecraft, which for decades has snapped images of the Earth and...

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Shuttle Update for July 17

Shuttle Atlantis:Shuttle Atlantis is being temporarily stored in the Vehicle Assembly Building at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Atlantis is scheduled to return to Orbiter Processing Facility-2 in August to complete transition and retirement processing. Atlantis is being prepared for public display at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex and is scheduled to roll over to the complex in November. The Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex is targeting a July 2013 grand opening...

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Tips to be Followed during Property Auction

When you find a property at auction, you will immediately think about the loss that the owner of the property must have gone through for the property to come for public auction. Auctions have become very common these days due to the financial crunch that came forth in the recent past leaving a lot of home owners to take this bitter decision. We can see auctions as one of the methods that are in practice for selling and buying properties. Mostly auctions are considered as loss for the property...

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NASA Satellites Examine a Powerful Summer Storm

As a powerful summertime storm, known as a derecho, moved from Illinois to the Mid-Atlantic states on June 29, expanding and bringing destruction with it, NASA and other satellites provided a look at various factors involved in the event, its progression and its aftermath.According to NOAA's Storm Prediction Center web site, a derecho (pronounced "deh-REY-cho") is a widespread, long-lived wind storm that is associated with a band of rapidly moving showers or thunderstorms. Damage from a derecho...

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Cassini Shows Why Jet Streams Cross-Cut Saturn

Turbulent jet streams, regions where winds blow faster than in other places, churn east and west across Saturn. Scientists have been trying to understand for years the mechanism that drives these wavy structures in Saturn's atmosphere and the source from which the jets derive their energy.In a new study appearing in the June edition of the journal Icarus, scientists used images collected over several years by NASA's Cassini spacecraft to discover that the heat from within the planet powers the...

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NASA readies to Hunt Black Holes with New Space Telescope

The U.S. space group is set to launch a telescope into space June 13 to seek out and learn black holes -- those still-mysterious space bodies that scientists consider lie at the spirit of every massive galaxy, including our own Milky Way. Black holes have a gravitational pull so intense that not even light can flee from them. As gas, dust and stars are sucked in; the fabric accelerates and heats up, generating powerful X-ray beam emissions. NASA is setting out to conduct a survey of the black...

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SpaceX journey should get NASA moving

A space capsule known as the Dragon touched down in the Pacific Ocean on Thursday. After launching into orbit May 22, the capsule had performed a sequence of complicated exercises, docked with the International Space Station, dropped off more than 1,000 pounds of provisions and returned home bearing a load of science experiments. It was the first profitable spacecraft to complete such an achievement. And the company that developed it, Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX, was...

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ISS Transit of Venus

In 1768, when James Cook sailed out of Plymouth harbor to observe the Transit of Venus in Tahiti, the trip was tantamount to a voyage through space. The remote island had just been "discovered" a year earlier, and by all accounts it was as strange and alien to Europeans as the stars themselves. Cook's pinpoint navigation to Tahiti and his subsequent observations of Venus crossing the South Pacific sun in 1769 have inspired explorers for centuries.  One of those explorers is about...

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SpaceX launches historic Trip to space station

The US Company SpaceX on Tuesday became the first marketable outfit to send its own spacecraft toward the International Station with the launch of the cargo-bearing Dragon capsule. Three, two, one and launch of the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, as NASA turns to the confidential sector to resupply the International Space Station," said NASA commentator George Diller, as the spaceship blasted off at 3.44 am . The trial flight -- which should include a fly by and berthing with the station in the coming...

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NASA is Training up an Astronaut for asteroid mission

NASA is presently teaching astronauts to land on asteroids and hopes to send humans to one of the distant space rocks in about a decade, The Telegraph reported over the weekend. As in the picture Armageddon, one inspiration for the attempt is to figure out a way to obliterate or deflect a huge asteroid that could be on a collision course with Earth.In June, a group of astronauts will start learning how to activate vehicles and move about on asteroids.Major Tim Peake, an astronaut with the European...

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NASA Telescope Sees the Light from an Alien Super- Earth’ 55 Cancri e

NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has detected light emanating from a "super-Earth" past our solar system for the first time. While the planet is not habitable, the recognition is a notable step toward the greatest search for signs of life on other planets."Spitzer has astonished us yet again," said Bill Danchi, Spitzer program scientist at NASA head office in Washington. The planet, called 55 Cancri e, falls into a group of planets termed wonderful Earths, which are more enormous than our residence...

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Private Company reschedules 1st Launch to Space Station to May 19

The private spaceflight corporation SpaceX has once again delayed the launch of its first commercial Dragon space capsule bound for the global Space Station, this time to May 19, to permit more time to complete final checks on the spacecraft's rocket. The new launch date, announced now (May 4), and is the newest delay for SpaceX, which originally hoped to loft the Dragon capsule on its debut journey to the space station on April 30.  Last week, the Hawthorne, Calif.-based Corporation...

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Hubble to Use Moon as Mirror to See Venus Transit

This mottled landscape showing the impact crater Tycho is among the most violent-looking places on our moon. Astronomers didn't aim NASA's Hubble Space Telescope to study Tycho, however. The image was taken in preparation to observe the transit of Venus across the sun's face on June 5-6. Hubble cannot look at the sun directly, so astronomers are planning to point the telescope at the Earth's moon, using it as a mirror to capture reflected sunlight and isolate the small fraction of the...

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Public Invited to Two Free Earth Day 2012 Events at NASA Goddard

NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. is hosting two free events on April 18 in celebration of Earth Day's forty-second anniversary. Both events will take place at the NASA Goddard Visitor's Center on IceSat Road, Greenbelt, Md.Often cited as the most-viewed photograph of all time, the view of Earth's disk from Apollo 17 is emblematic of our home planet as an isolated blue marble. Despite the ubiquity of the Blue Marble, few people realize NASA has viewed the Earth since the...

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Giant Prominence Erupts

A beautiful prominence eruption producing a coronal mass ejection (CME) shot off the east limb (left side) of the sun on April 16, 2012. Such eruptions are often associated with solar flares, and in this case an M1 class (medium-sized) flare occurred at the same time, peaking at 1:45 PM EDT. The CME was not aimed toward Earth....

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12-Mile-High Martian Dust Devil Caught in Act

A Martian dust devil roughly 12 miles high (20 kilometers) was captured whirling its way along the Amazonis Planitia region of Northern Mars on March 14. It was imaged by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. Despite its height, the plume is little more than three-quarters of a football field wide (70 yards, or 70 meters). Dust devils occur on Earth as well as on Mars. They are spinning columns of air, made visible by the dust...

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Hurricane Season 2012: Typhoon Pakhar (Western North Pacific Ocean)

Typhoon Pakhar made landfall on April 1 at 1200 UTC (8 a.m. EDT) in southeastern Vietnam and NASA satellites tracked its progress across Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand and into the Gulf of Thailand.A NASA satellite captured two infrared images of the clouds and thunderstorms that Pakhar brought when it made landfall. The two images were captured from the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) instrument on NASA's Aqua satellite on April 1 and April 2, after Typhoon Pakhar made landfall in southeastern...

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NASA GRAIL Returns First Student-Selected Moon Images

One of two NASA spacecraft orbiting the moon has beamed back the first student-requested pictures of the lunar surface from its onboard camera. Fourth grade students from the Emily Dickinson Elementary School in Bozeman, Mont., received the honor of making the first image selections by winning a nationwide competition to rename the two spacecraft. The image was taken by the MoonKam, or Moon Knowledge Acquired by Middle school students. Previously named Gravity Recovery And Interior Laboratory...

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NASA spacecraft puts moon in new focus

After buzzing around the moon for two years, NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has beamed more than 192 terabytes of data back to its home planet — more than all the printed information contained in the U.S. Library of Congress, says project scientist Richard Vondrak of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.Among those data are 4 billion measurements made by the orbiter’s laser altimeter, which allowed scientists to construct a detailed elevation map of the moon’s pockmarked surface....

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NASA’s Astrobiology Research Sparks 'GreenTech' Revolution

NASA’s astrobiologists study microbial life to understand how it transformed a rocky Earth into the thriving, diverse, life-sustaining planet we inhabit today. These studies of photosynthetic ‘green’ algae are creating sparks for new ‘green technologies’ on Earth and future human space exploration missions. “Once we understand these microbial recycling pathways, we can apply these processes in imaginative and innovative ways to solve problems on Earth, and in various space microgravity environments,”...

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NASA Seeking University Participants for Summer Rocket Workshop

University faculty and students are invited to join a weeklong workshop June 16-21 to learn how to build and launch a scientific experiment to space. Registration is open through May 1.RockOn! 2012 will be held at NASA's Wallops Flight Facility on the Eastern Shore of Virginia. The annual workshop is held in partnership with the Colorado and Virginia Space Grant Consortia."This workshop provides an opportunity for participants to learn how to build an experiment for space flight," said Phil Eberspeaker,...

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NASA Satellite Finds Earth's Clouds are Getting Lower

Earth's clouds got a little lower -- about one percent on average -- during the first decade of this century, finds a new NASA-funded university study based on NASA satellite data. The results have potential implications for future global climate.Scientists at the University of Auckland in New Zealand analyzed the first 10 years of global cloud-top height measurements (from March 2000 to February 2010) from the Multi-angle Imaging SpectroRadiometer (MISR) instrument on NASA's Terra spacecraft. The...

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The Sun As Art

A new interactive NASA art exhibit opens February 9 at the Maryland Science Center in Baltimore that will showcase stunning images of the sun.Called "Sun As Art," the collection consists of 20 full-color, high-resolution images of the star with which we live. Some of the pieces stand alone, beautiful images that hold true to the original picture. Others have been modified: one looks like an Andy Warhol painting; another like an orange. Several pieces in the collection have an interactive component...

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NASA Mission Returns First Video From Moon's Far Side

A camera aboard one of NASA's twin Gravity Recovery And Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) lunar spacecraft has returned its first unique view of the far side of the moon. MoonKAM, or Moon Knowledge Acquired by Middle school students, will be used by students nationwide to select lunar images for study. GRAIL consists of two identical spacecraft, recently named Ebb and Flow, each of which is equipped with a MoonKAM. The images were taken as part of a test of Ebb's MoonKAM on Jan. 19. The GRAIL project...

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NASA Mission Takes Stock of Earth's Melting Land Ice

In the first comprehensive satellite study of its kind, a University of Colorado at Boulder-led team used NASA data to calculate how much Earth's melting land ice is adding to global sea level rise. Using satellite measurements from the NASA/German Aerospace Center Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE), the researchers measured ice loss in all of Earth's land ice between 2003 and 2010, with particular emphasis on glaciers and ice caps outside of Greenland and Antarctica.The total...

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Astronomy team discovers nearby dwarf galaxy

NGC 4449 has a nucleus that may someday host a black hole and an irregular structure, lacking the spiral arms characteristic of many galaxies, he said. It is surrounded by a huge complex of hydrogen gas that spans approximately 300,000 light years, which may be fueling its burst of star formation. Rich collaborated with Francis Longstaff, a professor of finance at the UCLA Anderson School of Management and an amateur astronomer, in acquiring and using a specialized telescope designed to take...

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Powerful Pixels: Mapping the "Apollo Zone"

Grayscale pixels – up close, they look like black, white or grey squares. But when you zoom out to see the bigger picture, they can create a digital photograph, like this one of our moon:For NASA researchers, pixels are much more – they are precious data that help us understand where we came from, where we've been, and where we're going.At NASA's Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif., computer scientists have made a giant leap forward to pull as much information from imperfect static images...

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First of NASA's GRAIL spacecraft enters Moon orbit

The first of two NASA spacecraft to study the moon in unprecedented detail has entered lunar orbit.NASA's Gravity Recovery And Interior Laboratory (GRAIL)-A spacecraft successfully completed its planned main engine burn at 2 p.m. PST (5 p.m. EST) today. As of 3 p.m. PST (6 p.m. EST), GRAIL-A is in an orbit of 56 miles by 5,197 miles (90 kilometers by 8,363 kilometers) around the moon that takes approximately 11.5 hours to complete."My resolution for the new year is to unlock lunar mysteries...

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Voyager Instrument Cooling After Heater Turned off

It is now operating at a temperature below minus 79 degrees Celsius (minus 110 degrees Fahrenheit), the coldest temperature that the instrument has ever endured. This heater shut-off is a step in the careful management of the diminishing electrical power so that the Voyager spacecraft can continue to collect and transmit data through 2025.At the moment, the spectrometer continues to collect and return data. It was originally designed to operate at temperatures as low as minus 35 degrees Celsius...

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2012 Lunar Extreme Program and Workshop for Bay Area High School Teachers and Students

Dynamic Response of the Environment At the Moon – is one of several teams comprising the NASA Lunar Science Institute. The purpose of DREAM is to investigate the response of the lunar environment to the harsh and ever-changing conditions in space, including extreme events such as solar storms and impacts. DREAM is looking for two teams of high school teachers and students (4-6 students per teacher) in the Bay Area of California who would like to participate in the Lunar Extreme Program for...

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Fastest Rotating Star Found in Neighboring Galaxy

The massive, bright young star, called VFTS 102, rotates at a million miles per hour, or 100 times faster than our sun does. Centrifugal forces from this dizzying spin rate have flattened the star into an oblate shape and spun off a disk of hot plasma, seen edge on in this view from a hypothetical planet. The star may have "spun up" by accreting material from a binary companion star. The rapidly evolving companion later exploded as a supernova. The whirling star lies 160,000 light-years away in...

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