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New Horizons: Exploring Pluto and Beyond

This artist’s concept shows NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft during its 2015 encounter with Pluto and its moon, Charon. New Horizons is a NASA spacecraft that was the first to visit dwarf planet Pluto in July 2015. Its pictures of the dwarf planet’s icy surface, as well as observations of Pluto’s moon Charon, are revolutionizing our […]

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Cluster's Earth #selfie

Operations image of the week: After 16 years, a recommissioned, low-resolution ‘webcam’ on a Cluster satellite has snapped a #selfie with Earth To source

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Sentinel-3 and the ocean carbon conundrum

Each year, about a quarter of the carbon dioxide we release into the atmosphere ends up in the ocean, but how it happens is still not fully understood. The Sentinel-3A satellite is poised to play an important role in shedding new light on this exchange. To source

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Gravitational Waves: Did Merging Black Holes Form from Single Star?

An artist’s impression of two black holes circling each other, creating gravitational waves. A new theory posits that double black hole systems could form from a single star. Credit: K. Thorne (Caltech) and T. Carnahan (NASA GSFC) Could a single, dying star give birth to not one, but two black holes? Stranger things have happened […]

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Incredible New View of the Milky Way Revealed (Video)

An incredible new picture of the Milky Way shows our home galaxy glowing eerily in wavelengths that are invisible to the human eye, revealing zones of hidden star birth. Shining in submillimeter wavelengths (between infrared light and radio waves), the Milky Way stretches across the new image, which was taken using the APEX (Atacama Pathfinder […]

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SpaceX Scrubs Satellite Launch, Rocket Landing Attempt

SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket on the pad at Florida’s Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, ready for the planned Feb. 25, 2016 launch of the SES-9 communications satellite. Credit: SpaceX For the second day in a row, SpaceX has scrubbed the launch of the SES-9 commercial communications satellite — a mission that will also feature a daring […]

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Palm-Size Satellites Could Hunt for New Alien Worlds

When Gemini Planet Imager captured this picture of Beta Pictoris b, it had to block the starlight to keep it from interfering with light from the planet. A new project suggests using tiny satellites to hunt for other worlds closer to the star that can’t be spotted with direct imaging. Credit: Processing by Christian Marois, […]

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'Doctor' Cassini Takes Titan's Temperature

This sequence of maps shows varying surface temperatures on Saturn’s moon Titan at two-year intervals, from 2004 to 2016. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/GSFC When you go for your annual health checkup, you might expect the doctor to take your temperature. Well, it looks like Saturn’s moons also get the same treatment, courtesy of NASA. PHOTOS: 10 Years […]

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SpaceX Wins 5 New Space Station Cargo Missions in NASA Contract Estimated at $700 Million

A Dragon capsule leaving SpaceX’s Hawthorne, California, headquarters in 2015. Credit: SpaceX NASA has awarded five additional space station cargo-supply missions to SpaceX in a late-December contract with an undisclosed value that industry officials estimate at around $700 million. The contract, signed just before Christmas , was not announced at the time by either party […]

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Reusable Military Spaceplane Tops DARPA's Budget Request, Again

Boeing is one of three teams designing a new spaceplane for DARPA’s Experimental Spaceplane-1 program, known as XS-1. The program leads DARPA’s space-related budget requests for fiscal year 2017. Credit: Boeing WASHINGTON — For the second consecutive year, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s top-funded space program is an experimental spaceplane intended to make […]

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Space, astronomy and science