NASA’s Glory mission launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California Friday at 5:09:45 a.m. EST failed to reach orbit.

Telemetry indicated the fairing, the protective shell atop the Taurus XL rocket, did not separate as expected about three minutes after launch.

A press briefing to discuss the Glory launch failure is planned at Vandenberg for approximately 8:00 a.m. EST. …

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NASA’s Glory spacecraft is scheduled for launch on Friday, March 4. Technical issues with ground support equipment for the Taurus XL launch vehicle led to the scrub of the original Feb. 23 launch attempt. Those issues have been resolved.

The March 4 liftoff from Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif., is targeted for 5:09:43 a.m. EST, in the middle of a …

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Every day about 100 tons of meteoroids — fragments of dust and gravel and sometimes even big rocks – enter the Earth’s atmosphere. Stand out under the stars for more than a half an hour on a clear night and you’ll likely see a few of the meteors produced by the onslaught. But where does all this stuff come from? …

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NASA’s Stardust spacecraft returned new images of a comet showing a scar resulting from the 2005 Deep Impact mission. The images also showed the comet has a fragile and weak nucleus.

The spacecraft made its closest approach to comet Tempel 1 on Monday, Feb. 14, at 8:40 p.m. PST (11:40 p.m. EST) at a distance of approximately 178 kilometers (111 …

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NASA is about to discover how solar heat devours a comet.


Stardust-NExT chases a comet, an artist’s concept. [more]

“For the first time, we’ll see the same comet before and after its closest approach to the sun,” explains Joe Veverka, principal investigator for NASA’s Stardust-NExT mission.

The comet is Tempel 1, which NASA’s Deep Impact probe visited in …

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In an unexpected reversal of fortune, NASA’s NanoSail-D spacecraft has unfurled a gleaming sheet of space-age fabric 650 km above Earth, becoming the first-ever solar sail to circle our planet.

“We’re solar sailing!” says NanoSail-D principal investigator Dean Alhorn of the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, AL. “This is a momentous achievement.”


An artist’s concept of a solar sail …

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Astronomers have discovered a massive cluster of young galaxies forming in the distant universe. The growing galactic metropolis, named COSMOS-AzTEC3, is the most distant known massive “proto-cluster” of galaxies, lying about 12.6 billion light-years away from Earth. Members of the developing cluster are shown here, circled in white, in this image taken by Japan’s Subaru telescope atop Mauna Kea in

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The first scientific results from ESA’s Planck mission were released at a press briefing today in Paris. The findings focus on the coldest objects in the Universe, from within our Galaxy to the distant reaches of space.

This image shows the location of the first six fields used to detect and study the Cosmic Infrared Background. The fields, named N1,

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The 33-year odyssey of NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft has reached a distant point at the edge of our solar system where there is no outward motion of solar wind.

Now hurtling toward interstellar space some 10.8 billion miles from the sun, Voyager 1 has crossed into an area where the velocity of the hot ionized gas, or plasma, emanating directly …

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A Geminid fireball explodes over the Mojave Desert in 2009. Credit: Wally Pacholka / AstroPics.com / TWAN.

The Geminid meteor shower, which peaks this year on Dec. 13th and 14th, is the most intense meteor shower of the year. It lasts for days, is rich in fireballs, and can be seen from almost any point on Earth.

It’s also NASA …

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