Researchers from the University of Washington have been funded by NASA to develop a magnetized-beam plasma propulsion system (or mag-beam). Selected as part of NASA's recent Advanced Concepts study, the system would involve a space-based satellite that would fire a stream of magnetized ions at a spacecraft equipped with a magnetic sail. The researchers think they could get a spacecraft going fast enough that it could make a round trip to Mars in 90 days, as long as there was another station at Mars that could slow the spacecraft down again.
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When NASA's Cassini spacecraft took off towards Saturn, it brought along a passenger: the ESA's Huygens probe, which is designed study Saturn's largest moon, Titan. The two spacecraft have been orbiting together for a few months now, but on January 14, 2005, Huygens will make the plunge into Titan's thick methane and hydrocarbon atmosphere. And if it's really lucky, the probe will survive the journey down to the moon's surface, and give scientists a unique opportunity to study an environment that might have been similar to our own Earth's early history.
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Scientists from the Los Alamos Laboratory are beginning to study the data returned by from the Cassini Plasma Spectrometer (CAPS); an instrument on board the spacecraft designed to measure the space environment around the Ringed Planet. During its first pass over the rings, the instrument turned up low energy plasma which seems to be trapped on the magnetic field lines between Saturn's Cassini Division, the gap between the planet's A and B rings. Cassini will have another 70 orbits around Saturn so the team will have many more opportunities to make discoveries.
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David Hardy illustrates and Patrick Moore writes to make their book
Futures - 50 Years in Space, The Challenge of the Stars a portable art gallery of near and far space phenomena. With imagination to spare and drawing upon a universe of subject matter, they conjure up views and perspectives of planets and skies that are all, literally and figuratively, out of this world. But their incantations and apparitions aren't complete speculation. Each author brings over fifty years of relevant work experience which results in apparitions that are likely more prescient than most.
The European-built Cupola module has arrived at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, and is now being prepared for an upcoming shuttle launch. When it's finally installed on the International Space Station, it will give astronauts a panoramic view of the station and the Earth below. They won't just be gazing dreamily at our planet, though, the Cupola will let crewmembers monitor spacewalks, docking operations and exterior equipment surveys. If all goes well, the Cupola will launch on STS-133, which is now due to lift off in 2009.
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NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has turned up a relatively close globular star cluster that was obscured by dust and invisible to most instruments. Andrew Monson from the University of Wyoming first discovered the cluster while scanning for objects in the dusty mid-plane of the Milky Way. Follow up observations determined that the cluster is only 9,000 light-years away from the Earth in the constellation of Aquila, making it one of the closest clusters to our planet.
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Dr. Maxime Faget, one of the most prolific of NASA's spacecraft designers, passed away on Saturday at the age of 83. Faget contributed to designs to every single NASA spacecraft, from the Mercury capsule to the space shuttle. He started working with for the US space effort in 1946, when he joined the staff of the Langley Research Center as a research scientist. He was later selected as one of the original 35 designers for the Mercury project. Faget retired from NASA in 1981, and went on to work for a private space firm called Space Industries Inc.
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This image of a Martian landscape was taken by the European Space Agency's Mars Express spacecraft in May 2004. It shows an area in the Promethei Terra region, which is relatively smooth, but covered with a layer of dust or volcanic ash several tens of metres thick. This layer has covered everything, and obscures fine details; that's why the picture looks a little fuzzy. The crisscrossing lines across the picture are the tracks left by dust devils.
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European and US astronomers have linked up their radio telescopes for the first time in real-time, through the Internet. The researchers have created the world's biggest virtual radio telescope by merging observations from instruments in the UK, Sweden, the Netherlands, Poland, and Puerto Rico. The virtual instrument has a resolution which is 5 times better than the Hubble Space Telescope. The team imaged an object called IRC+10420, a star nearing the end of its life; at some point in the near future it'll explode as a supernova.
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Now operating three times longer than originally expected, NASA's Mars Exploration Rovers are still turning up fresh evidence that liquid water once flowed on Mars. Opportunity has found a rock, dubbed "Escher", which has a network of cracks similar to cracked mud when the water has dried up. On the other side of Mars, Spirit is still climbing up the "Columbia Hills", and it seems that every rock it looks at shows evidence that it was altered by water. "We haven't seen a single unaltered volcanic rock, since we crossed the boundary from the plains into the hills, and I'm beginning to suspect we never will," said principal investigator Dr. Steve Squyres.
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Researchers from Caltech have looked deep into space to a time when early material in the Universe was swirling towards the creation of galaxy clusters and superclusters. They did their measurements using an instrument in the Chilean Andes called the Cosmic Background Imager (CBI), which looks at the Universe when it was only 400,000 years old - a time before galaxies, stars, and planets had formed. By watching the motion of this material as it began forming larger structures, the researchers were able to confirm that dark matter and dark energy were having an effect even then.
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With all this talk of global warming, it may come as a surprise that Antarctica has actually been mostly getting colder over the last 30 years. But new research from NASA indicates that this trend is about to reverse, and the continent will warm over the next 50 years. Researchers found, ironically, that low ozone levels actually made the continent colder, but with restrictions on ozone-destroying chemicals around the planet, this cooling effect is going to go away as the ozone layer returns. If temperatures rise too high, the continent's ice sheets will melt and slide into the ocean, raising water levels around the world.
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Researchers from Indiana University have found that under Mars-like conditions, Epsom-like salts can contain a significant amount of water. This could help explain why NASA's Mars Odyssey spacecraft discovered a large amount of water near the surface of Mars, but it's not visible. To get to the bottom of this possibility, the researchers have been funded by NASA to help build an X-ray diffractometer, which a future rover would use to analyze crystals on Mars to see if they're the right kind of salt that could contain water.
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The closest stars to our Solar System probably haven't been discovered because it's likely they're of a cool, dim class of failed stars called brown dwarfs. But a new mission from NASA called the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) has recently been approved for development, and it should be able to locate them. Scheduled for launch in 2008, and costing $208 million, WISE will scan the entire sky in infrared, looking for brown dwarfs, planet-forming disks around nearby stars, and colliding galaxies. Eventually it will build up a database of more than one million images, containing hundreds of millions of objects.
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Astronomers using the Gemini observatories have got themselves a bit of a mystery. They've found a binary system at EF Eridanus, located 300 light-years away from Earth, where one of the objects defies classification. It's about the size of Jupiter but it's way too massive to be a planet. It's the temperature of a brown dwarf, but its light doesn't match a brown dwarf's characteristics. The researchers believe that the object was once a regular star, but then it had most of its material stripped away by the gravity of the larger star over the course of 5 billions years. Eventually it just couldn't give any more.
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A problem with the wheels on NASA's Spirit rover has stopped it dead in its tracks on the surface of Mars. For some reason, the rover's right-front and left-rear wheels stopped operating as commanded on Oct. 1. NASA engineers have performed a series of diagnostic tests to understand which systems could be affected, and they're still analyzing the results. One fix would be to permanently disable the brakes on those wheels, but it could put the rover at an increased risk. Spirit has now traveled 3.6 km (2.2 miles) across the surface of Mars; much further than it was designed for, so it's no surprise it's starting to have some mechanical problems.
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On October 9, 1604, a new star appeared in the sky as bright as any of the planets. Johannes Kepler, who discovered the laws of planetary motion, was one of the astronomers at the time who tried to study this supernova, before telescopes were even invented. Now NASA has turned its Great Observatories (Hubble, Chandra, and Spitzer) on the supernova remnant, and produced an image that shows it in many different wavelengths of light. The combined image shows a bubble-shaped shroud of gas and dust 14 light-years wide expanding at 6 million kph (4 million mph).
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Arianespace has announced that they will be launching a cluster of 50 nanosatellites in 2007 to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the first satellite launch of Sputnik in 1957. Each tiny satellite will weigh only 1 kg (2.2 lbs), and contain a scientific package developed by a single country - all 50 will be launched at the same time, on one rocket. The nanosats will last in orbit for about 2 years.
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NASA has had two momentous changes in the last few years. One is the loss of the Columbia shuttle. Two is the replacement of administrator Daniel Goldin by Sean O'Keefe. In their book
New Moon Rising, Frank Sietzen and Keith Cowing claim that the consequence of these changes is that NASA finally has things right and will accomplish their new vision; to send humans to live in space. This is a very bold claim and though there is not much factual content to support this, the book does provide good detail on the process by which NASA obtained this vision.
Astronaut Gordon Cooper, who piloted missions in both the Mercury and Gemini programs, died on Monday at his home in Ventura, California; he was 77. Cooper was the youngest of the original 7 Mercury astronauts, and his mission on May 15, 1963 - the final one in the Mercury program - lasted more than 34 hours and 22 orbits. Cooper and Pete Conrad flew the third flight of the Gemini program in 1965, and stayed in space for 191 hours, establishing a new space endurance record.
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NASA is considering a new space-based telescope that would be the equivalent of a 40-metre (120 ft) observatory. The proposed Space Infrared Interferometric Telescope (SPIRIT) mission would consist of two infrared telescopes at opposite sides of a rail that could be positioned perfectly to combine their images into a single, giant telescope. SPIRIT is being considered as part of NASA's Origins program, which is looking to answer fundamental questions about the beginning of the universe. If selected, it would launch in 2014.
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A NASA-funded study has predicted 15 of California's 16 largest earthquakes this decade, demonstrating that scientists are finally getting a handle on the warning signs that lead to big quakes. The team looked at historical earthquake data back to 1932, and then used this to build a model that predicts earthquake hotspots in California. One warning sign that a big quake is going to happen is when there's a series of small earthquakes above magnitude 3 which indicate that pressure is building up; another is when the fault appears to stop entirely.
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NASA scientists flew a small aircraft equipped with a special infrared camera above Mount Saint Helens last week to see if this perspective would give any insights into what's happening underneath the surface. Shortly after they took this image, the volcano spewed out a large blast of steam. The team had actually been planning this mission for quite a while, so it was a complete coincidence that they arrived when the volcano was about to erupt.
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This image was taken by the European Space Agency's Mars Express spacecraft on June 4, and it shows a series of parallel fault lines in the western part of Solis Planum. These fault lines can be traced for several hundred kilometres to the northern Tharsis shield volcanoes.
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Living at the centre of the Milky Way would be beautiful, but dangerous, according to research from the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Every 20 million years or so, a ring of gas and dust 500 light-years away from the middle of the galaxy collapses, beginning a furious period of star formation, which then sets off a series of supernovae. A planet in the area would be completely sterilized of life as star after star explodes. The next starburst period in the Milky Way is likely to happen in about 10 million years, but don't worry, we're far enough away that nothing would happen to the Earth.
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A common science experiment for young kids is to build a pinhole camera. Researchers from the University of Colorado at Boulder think NASA should build a gigantic one in space and use it to find planets orbiting other stars. The "New Worlds Imager" would be a football field-sized opaque light shade with a small opening right at the centre to let light through. A detector spacecraft would sit thousands of kilometres back and collect the light that comes through the opening. The shade would block the light from the star and let astronomers detect planets orbiting it. The proposal was one of 12 advanced concepts recently selected for further study by NASA.
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Supernovae are easy to see - after they've gone off. But it's impossible to find the stars beforehand, so you can study their final moments. Astronomers think they've found a warning sign that a star is about to explode: X-ray flashes. NASA's High-Energy Transient Explorer (HETE-2) has spotted three different powerful blasts of x-ray radiation over the last few weeks, and if astronomers' models hold true, these are precursors to much more powerful gamma-ray bursts, which have been linked with supernovae. Many telescopes around the world will be studying the regions that these x-ray flashes happened, hoping to catch a supernova in the act of exploding.
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Traveling in space could be hard on your immune system, according to a new study funded by NASA. Researchers tested 25 astronauts before and after various space shuttle missions of varying lengths, and found that white blood cells increased after the astronauts returned from space. The increased number of white blood cells meant that the astronauts bodies were working overtime to fight off various microbes and diseases. And it appears that these effects probably increase as missions get longer and more difficult.
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This photo, taken by NASA's Cassini spacecraft, shows the tiny moon Prometheus, which serves as a shepherd to the inside edge of Saturn's knotted F ring. It's only 102 km (63 miles) long, so Cassini had to take several images of it, which were then stitched together on computer to enhance resolution and reduce noise. It was first discovered during the Voyager mission, and scientists saw a hint of the ridges, valleys and craters that marred its irregular surface. Cassini is expected to make a much closer flyby of the tiny moon later in its mission.
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Here's a 1024x768 desktop wallpaper from a deep field image taken by the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope to celebrate its 25th anniversary. This part is actually just a fraction of the full image that contains more than half a million galaxies in just a one-degree square field of the sky. Once one of the larger telescopes in the world, the 3.6-metre instrument has been updated regularly with state of the art technology including adaptive optics and a 340 mega pixel digital camera.
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NASA's Institute for Advanced Concepts has selected 12 proposals for further study as part of its goal of finding revolutionary ideas that could help the agency's plans for human space exploration. Proposals selected as part of Phase 1 will receive $75,000 for a six-month study. Those selected for Phase 2 will have two years and $400,000 to further develop their concept. Some of the Phase 1 winners include an infrared observatory on the Moon, lunar space elevators, electrostatic radiation shields and a plasma propulsion system.
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As predicted, Asteroid Toutatis made its closest approach to the Earth today, passing a mere 1.5 million km (930,000 miles) away from our planet - 4 times the distance from the Earth to the Moon. The 4.6 km (2.9 mile) long asteroid hasn't made an approach this close since 1353. Since it was first discovered in 1989, Toutatis has been closely studied by astronomers because it has an orbit that brings it close to the Earth every 4 years. Unfortunately, it's still too dim to see with the unaided eye, but skilled amateur astronomers with telescopes watching the southern skies have spotted it. Toutatis won't get this close again until 2562.
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It was a nailbiter this morning at the Mojave spaceport in California when SpaceShipOne successfully returned to space; half way to winning the $10 million X-Prize.
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It's been said that an army travels on its stomach. Well, that's true with astronauts too. Especially when they're headed to Mars, and might need to stay a few years; or maybe even build a colony. The question is, how much space, soil, water, energy and air does it take to keep astronauts alive on another planet if they're growing all their own food? Ray Collins has locked himself inside a greenhouse in Alaska, and he's working towards discovering the answer.
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Early rocketeers had a vision. They wanted to enable human beings to safely travel from Earth to any destination in the solar system. Wernher von Braun in the USA and Vladimir Chelomey of the Soviet Union both believed that a space station was a necessary first step to achieving this destination. Robert Zimmerman shares this vision and belief and in his book,
Leaving Earth - Space Stations, Rival Superpowers, and the Quest for Interplanetary Travel he shows how humankind, especially the old Soviet Union, has made substantial progress in achieving it. He also shows that, sadly, the rational for this progress was predominantly for disparate political benefits rather than for satisfying any vision.
NASA's Mars Global Surveyor has delivered a series of new photographs of the Red Planet taken in new high detail, including images of the Mars Exploration rovers. By rolling the spacecraft as it travels to match the movement of Mars underneath, NASA engineers have figured out a clever way to increase the resolution of images taken by the spacecraft. It's now capable of resolving images as detailed as half as 1.5 metres across (4.9 feet) - a threefold improvement. Mars Global Surveyor has been systematically mapping Mars since it arrived in 1999, and its latest mission extension beginning October 1 will keep it running into September 2006.
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When it comes to astronomy, size is everything. The biggest telescope on the planet is the 11-metre Hobby-Eberly on Mount Fowlkes in Texas. And the twin 10-metre Keck telescopes perched atop Mauna Kea on the Big Island of Hawaii can work in tandem to act as an even larger telescope. But there are new observatories in the works, with telescopes that will be 30-metres across and larger. Once these turn their gaze into the heavens, astronomers will have some amazingly powerful tools at their disposal.
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Asteroid Toutatis, a frequent visitor in our neighborhood, will pass as close as 1.5 million km (960,000) miles to the Earth on Wednesday. As spacerocks go, Toutatis is pretty big; it's 5 km (3.1 miles) long and weighs 2.5 billion kg (5.5 billion pounds) - an asteroid this size was thought to have wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. Although there are plenty of doomsayers predicting the Earth's demise, Toutatis will keep its distance, passing four times as far as the Moon. The spacerock isn't visible without a telescope, and its position depends where on Earth you're looking at it. This makes it a very challenging object for amateur astronomers to spot.
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Data accumulated by the ASPERA-3 instrument on board the European Space Agency's Mars Express spacecraft seems to indicate how Mars got so dry. Scientists believe that water used to cover Mars, but over the course of 3.8 billion years, it was stripped away from the planet by the Sun's solar wind. ASPERA-3 tracks the inflow of particles from the solar wind, and then tracks the outflow of particles escaping from the Martian atmosphere. It found that the solar wind penetrates deeply into the atmosphere to an altitude of 270 km, energizes particles, and causes about 1 kg (2.2 pounds) of material to trail away from Mars every second. Over the years it added up to make the planet bone dry.
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The da Vinci Project, a Canadian team of amateur rocket scientists, has pushed back the launch date of its Wildfire rocket. The Wildfire was originally scheduled to launch on October 2, which would put it only a few days after Scaled Composite's SpaceShipOne makes its launch attempt to win the $10 million X-Prize. The delay was required because the team was still waiting on some key components that they needed to install in the suborbital rocket. It's not known when they'll make their launch attempt.
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NASA scientists picking through the wreckage of Genesis' capsule have shipped off the first sample to the University of California, Berkeley for further analysis. These samples were attached to the interior lid of the capsule - its "lid foils" - and the scientists think they'll be able to recover 75-80% of this material. The next challenge are the four collector arrays which were fairly damaged, but some large pieces have been recovered.
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An international team of scientists have discovered one of the most powerful events since the Big Bang: a collision between two galaxy clusters, which is smashing millions of stars into each other. The galaxy clusters are colliding like hurricanes, tossing individual galaxies out into interstellar space, and creating shockwaves more than 100-million degrees hot. Although the cluster, Abell 754, has been known for a long time, the astronomers used the ESA's XMM-Newton X-Ray Observatory to trace back the interactions and collisions with great detail, and get a much deeper understanding about how the Universe's largest structures are still forming.
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Astronomers have been studying the deepest optical view of the Universe - the Hubble Ultra Deep Field (HUDF) - and they think they've found some of the first star forming galaxies. These galaxies began forming 0.5 to 1 billion years after the Big Bang. The team analyzed the HUDF, and found dozens of red, dim dwarf galaxies, which appear to be the first basic galactic building blocks. These would merge with other galaxies to eventually form the complex spiral formations like our own Milky Way. The also found regions which were more dense than others, which supports the theory that dense regions of space where the first places galaxies formed.
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Something is radiating high-energy gamma rays at the heart of our Milky Way galaxy, and astronomers aren't sure what it is. The object was discovered using the High Energy Stereoscopic System (H.E.S.S.), an array of four telescopes, in Namibia, South-West Africa. One theory is that it's the remnant from a supernova that exploded 10,000 years ago; this has enough energy to accelerate gamma rays so strongly. The object is also very near the supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way, so this radiation could be somehow associated with it.
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When the Larsen B ice shelf broke away from the coast of Antarctica two years ago, nearby glaciers surged, flowing eight times faster. This is according to a new study by NASA-funded researchers who used several Earth observing satellites to track the movements of Antarctic glaciers. It appears that the ice shelves hold glaciers back, like a dam. Once the shelf breaks up, the glacier is free to flow quickly. These glaciers aren't that large, but this research gives scientists an understanding of what will happen as rising temperatures continue breaking up Antarctica's ice shelves.
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NASA has approved a six month extension for the Mars Exploration Rovers, giving them more time to continue exploring the surface of Mars for evidence of past water. Both Spirit and Opportunity have completed their original three-month mission, and an additional five-month extension. Even though the rovers are well past their expected operational life, neither one is showing much sign of wear, so NASA scientists plan to keep them running. The rovers took a 12-day break earlier this month as Mars passed behind the Sun, disrupting all communication to and from the Red Planet.
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NASA has chosen Northrop Grumman Space Technology to build its upcoming Prometheus Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter (JIMO) spacecraft, and awarded them a $400 million contract to cover costs up to 2008. JIMO will use a nuclear-powered ion engine to go into orbit around each of Jupiter's icy moons: Callisto, Ganymede, and Europa. Once in orbit, the spacecraft would be able to examine each of the moons in great detail with a suite of instruments to try and understand their composition, history, and if there could be conditions for life.
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SpaceDev, the company that designed and built the hybrid rocket engine for Scaled Composite's SpaceShipOne, announced that they've entered discussions with NASA to design a low-cost suborbital spaceship. The SpaceDev Dream Chaser would take off vertically, and carry up to three people to an altitude of 160 km (100 miles). If everything goes well, the spacecraft would be built by 2008, and would demonstrate a set of launch and flight technologies. Further versions of the spacecraft would eventually be able to go into orbit and transfer crew to and from the International Space Station.
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This is an image of Saturn's tiny moon Prometheus, which shepherds the inner edge of Saturn's F ring. The irregular moon is only 102 km (63 miles) across but its gravity defines the edge of the ring, essentially keeping it in line. The image was taken by NASA's Cassini spacecraft on August 5, when it was 8.2 million km (5.1 million miles) from the planet.
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