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| Sweeping View of the Rings |
| Sep 21, 2005 - Cassini recently took this beautiful photograph of Saturn's rings, sweeping across the sky. Its tiny moon Pan (26 kilometers, or 16 miles across) is barely visible inside the Encke gap, in the middle of the photograph. The Cassini Division is the darker area at the upper left-hand portion of the picture. (Full Story) |
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| Magnificent Desolation: Walking on the Moon 3D |
| Sep 21, 2005 - Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. For a desolation to be beautiful, there must be something special. Just after Dr. Buzz Aldrin stepped onto the moon, Neil Armstrong asked him what were his thoughts. He replied, "it's a magnificent desolation". Nearly forty years later, Tom Hanks, Gary Goetzman and Mark Cowen combine the wizardry of IMAX with the magic of top flight professional entertainers to the film Magnificent Desolation. The result puts the viewer on the surface of the moon and lets them experience its strange but magnificent beauty all for themselves. (Full Story) |
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| Artist illustration of future astronauts on the Moon. Image credit: NASA. Click to enlarge. |
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| NASA Wants Rovers That Can Dig Lunar Soil |
| Sep 20, 2005 - NASA has announced its fifth Centennial Challenges prize competition: the Regolith Excavation Challenge. Teams will compete head to head in 2006 or 2007 to see whose digging machine can excavate the most lunar soil, or regolith, in 30 minutes and deliver it to a collector. Any future moon base will require large quantities of regolith to be moved around by robotic diggers, so NASA is hoping to see innovative ideas now to base future technologies around. (Full Story) |
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| Before (2002) and after pictures of a new gully on a sand dune on Mars. Image credit: NASA/JPL. Click to enlarge. |
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| Brand New Martian Gullies |
| Sep 20, 2005 - Mars is a more dramatically changing place than scientists had ever imagined. Thanks to its long lifetime, the Mars Global Surveyor has spotted a gully coming down the side of a sand dune that didn't exist just three years ago. The gully could have formed when frozen carbon dioxide was suddenly warmed up enough that it evaporated, releasing gas that flowed downhill like a liquid. Mars Global Surveyor is still very healthy, and could be making observations 5-10 years from now. (Full Story) |
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| The centre of this infrared image shows the higher mass primary star (pink) and its lower mass companion. Image credit: CfA. Click to enlarge. |
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| Binary Star Baby Picture |
| Sep 20, 2005 - Newborn stars hide in a shroud of dust and gas, so they're difficult to photograph. Astronomers have used the infrared UKIRT telescope on Mauna Kea, Hawaii to peer through one of these envelopes to see a pair of newborn stars - probably only 100,000 years old. The stars are quite large; however, they weigh 10 times the mass of the Sun together. The surrounding disk of material probably has enough left over to create 100 Jupiter-mass planets. (Full Story) |
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| Artist illustration of the heart of galaxy M31. Image credit: NASA. Click to enlarge. |
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| Halo of Blue Stars Around a Black Hole |
| Sep 20, 2005 - Astronomers have known about a strange blue light coming from the heart of the Andromeda Galaxy (M31) for many years, but they were never sure exactly what it was. Thanks to new observations from Hubble, they now know it's a ring of young hot stars which are whipping around the supermassive black hole in the middle of M31. The 400 stars are packed into a disk only 1 light-year across, which is nestled inside a larger ring of older, redder stars. Our own Milky Way might have a similar phenomenon, which means this could be the situation in most galaxies. (Full Story) |
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