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NASA’s Lunar Orbiter Gets an Art Lesson with Lasers

January 17, 2013

Want to stay on top of all the space news? Follow @universetoday on Twitter In the ultimate example of science imitating art, engineers working with NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter recently beamed an image of the Mona Lisa to the LRO and back via laser beam in order to measure the rate of transmission between the [...]

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Curiosity’s Laser Leaves Its Mark

August 30, 2012

Before-and-after images from Curiosity’s ChemCam  micro-imager show holes left by its million-watt laser (NASA/JPL-Caltech/LANL/CNES/IRAP/LPGN/CNRS) PEWPEWPEWPEWPEW! Curiosity’s head-mounted ChemCam did a little target practice on August 25, blasting millimeter-sized holes in a soil sample named “Beechey” in order to acquire spectrographic data from the resulting plasma glow. The neat line of holes is called a five-by-one [...]

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Take a Look Through Curiosity’s ChemCam

August 22, 2012

This (adjusted) image was taken by ChemCam’s Remote Micro-Imager on Sol 15 (NASA/JPL-Caltech/LANL) While Curiosity has been getting a good look around its landing spot on Mars, taking in the sights and sending back some impressive views of distant hills and Gale Crater’s enormous central peak, it’s also been peering very closely at some tiny [...]

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How Do The Biggest Telescopes Work?

May 17, 2012

Located high in the mountains of Chile’s Atacama Desert, the enormous telescopes of the European Southern Observatory have been providing astronomers with unprecedented views of the night sky for 50 years. ESO’s suite of telescopes take advantage of the cold, clear air over the Atacama, which is one of the driest places on Earth. But [...]

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NASA to Test Laser Communications System

October 12, 2011

Quite often, communication rates with remote spacecraft have been a limiting factor when exploring our solar system. For example, it can take up to 90 minutes to transfer one high-resolution image from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter to scientists on Earth. Improving data communication rates would allow scientists to collect additional data from future missions to [...]

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