News

Inch by power-conserving inch, drivers on Earth have moved the Mars rover Spirit to a spot where it has its best chance at surviving a third Martian winter — and where it will celebrate its fourth anniversary (in Earth years) since bouncing down on Mars for a projected 90-day mission in January 2004.Meanwhile, researchers are […]

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Astronomers have at last found definitive evidence that the universe’s first dust – the celestial stuff that seeded future generations of stars and planets – was forged in the explosions of massive stars.The findings, made with NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope, are the most significant clue yet in the longstanding mystery of where the dust in […]

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Perhaps the first stars in the newborn universe did not shine, but instead were invisible “dark stars” 400 to 200,000 times wider than the sun and powered by the annihilation of mysterious dark matter, a University of Utah study concludes. The study calculated how the birth of the first stars almost 13 billion years ago […]

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Using the Sun Earth Connection Coronal and Heliospheric Investigation (SECCHI) instruments on board NASA’s Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory (STEREO) spacecraft, a consortium of scientists has seen, for the first time, large waves of solar material sweeping past Earth. The SECCHI team has obtained images of the density enhancements whose prior existence was known only from […]

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A fleet of NASA spacecraft, launched less than eight months ago, has made three important discoveries about spectacular eruptions of Northern Lights called “substorms” and the source of their power.NASA’s Time History of Events and Macroscale Interactions during Substorms (THEMIS) mission observed the dynamics of a rapidly developing substorm, confirmed the existence of giant magnetic […]

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