This set of artist’s concepts shows NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory cruise capsule and NASA’s Orion spacecraft, which is being built now at NASA’s Johnson Space Center and will one day send astronauts to Mars. The rover Curiosity is tucked inside of the Mars Science Laboratory cruise vehicle like human beings would be tucked inside Orion. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/JSC

Measurements taken …

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Saturn and Titan


The Cassini spacecraft looks down, almost directly at the north pole of Dione. The feature just left of the terminator at bottom is Janiculum Dorsa, a long, roughly north-south trending ridge. Image credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

From a distance, most of the Saturnian moon Dione resembles a bland cueball. Thanks to close-up images of a 500-mile-long (800-kilometer-long) mountain on the …

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This artist’s conception shows how families of asteroids are created. Over the history of our solar system, catastrophic collisions between asteroids located in the belt between Mars and Jupiter have formed families of objects on similar orbits around the sun. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Data from NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) have led to a new and improved family tree …

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The first radar images of asteroid 1998 QE2 were obtained when the asteroid was about 3.75 million miles (6 million kilometers) from Earth. The radar collage covers a little bit more than two hours. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/GSSR

Approaching asteroid 1998 QE2 has a moon. Researchers found it in a sequence of radar images obtained by the 70-meter Deep Space Network …

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NASA is tracking a large near-Earth asteroid as it passes by the Earth-Moon system on May 31st. Amateur astronomers in the northern hemisphere may be able to see the space rock for themselves during the 1st week of June.

Here we go again. Another asteroid is paying a visit to the Earth-Moon system.

Asteroids have been a hot topic since …

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An artist’s rendering of an outburst on an ultra-magnetic neutron star, also called a magnetar.

Astronomers using NASA’s Swift X-ray Telescope have observed a spinning neutron star suddenly slowing down, yielding clues they can use to understand these extremely dense objects.

A neutron star is the crushed core of a massive star that ran out of fuel, collapsed under its …

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Planetary Resource’s dedication to prospecting asteroids with space telescopes is an interesting opportunity. Today (May 29th, 2013) they’ll be announcing something big that anyone can be a part of.

Planetary Resources has a team of engineers who have designed, built and operated spacecraft throughout the Solar System, including all of the recent U.S. Mars landers and rovers, are now developing …

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In this composite image, visible-light observations by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope are combined with infrared data from the ground-based Large Binocular Telescope in Arizona to assemble a dramatic view of the well-known Ring Nebula. Credit: NASA, ESA, C.R. Robert O’Dell (Vanderbilt University), G.J. Ferland (University of Kentucky), W.J. Henney and M. Peimbert (National Autonomous University of Mexico). Credit for Large

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A massive and rare merging of two galaxies has been spotted in images taken by the Herschel space observatory, a European Space Agency mission with important NASA participation.

Follow-up studies by several telescopes on the ground and in space, including NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and Spitzer Space Telescope, tell a tale of two faraway galaxies intertwined and furiously making stars. …

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ESA today inaugurated a new hub that will strengthen Europe’s contribution to the global hunt for asteroids and other hazardous natural objects that may strike Earth.

Near-Earth Objects, or NEOs, are asteroids or comets with sizes ranging from metres to tens of kilometres that orbit the Sun and whose orbits come close to that of Earth. There are over 600 …

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