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Twin setbacks force NASA into new reality
Two recent announcements seriously altered NASA's future for at least a decade: The first involved deep cuts in the International Space Station by the Bush administration, which canceled three key U.S. segments of the station. The other was the death of the X-33, a $1.3 billion prototype for a spaceship called VentureStar that was billed as a replacement to NASA's space shuttle fleet.
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Ganymede’s Liquid Past
Long swaths of bright, flat terrain on the surface of Jupiter's icy moon Ganymede may testify that water or slush emerged there about a billion years ago, say planetary scientists.
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Testing the connection for SETI
How do researchers looking for alien radio signals know their equipments working correctly? In a dispatch from Arecibo, astronomer Seth Shostak says its not a simple task.
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Our universe is a real lightweight
A team of researchers that looked at data from more than 140,000 galaxies says the universe is far from heavy and has a density of next to nothing. “It’s about 300 billion billion billion times less dense than water,” said John Peacock of the University of Edinburgh, “or one ten-thousandth of an ounce in a volume the same size as the earth.”
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Mysterious Stellar Variations in Globular Cluster
Born from the same cloud of gas and dust, the stars of a globular cluster should resemble each other in chemical composition. However, an international team of astronomers has found unexpected differences among the dwarf stars of NGC 6752 that are hard to explain.
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Some Like it Hot
NASA astrobiologist Jack Farmer studies microorganisms in the hot springs of Yellowstone and in hydrothermal vents on the ocean floor. His work may help NASA search for traces of life on Mars.
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Encounter with the Moon stone
BBC News Online science editor Dr David Whitehouse comes face to face with what is claimed to be the oldest map of the Moon ever made, in Knowth in Ireland.
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Starbirth May Spread like Bushfires
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Hubble Spies Huge Clusters of Stars Formed by Ancient Encounter
Just below the nose of Leo the Lion lies a barred spiral galaxy called NGC 2903. A popular spring target for amateur astronomers, the galaxy is brighter than 10th magnitude and easily observable with a moderate-sized telescope. The Hubble Space Telescope (HST) has now zoomed in on the heart of NGC 2903, and the result reveals surprising details about the formations of the galaxy's youngest stars.
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A Supermassive Black Hole in a Nearby Galaxy
Using the ISAAC instrument at the ESO Very Large Telescope (VLT), an international team of astronomers has peered right through the spectacular dust lane of the peculiar galaxy Centaurus A, located approximately 11 million light-years away.
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A Shortage of Planets
When they turned the Hubble Space Telescope on a distant globular cluster of stars, astronomers expected to find fifteen or twenty planets. They found zero.
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Rocks reveal amazing dino lights
When the dinosaurs walked the Earth, the planet's magnetic field was three times stronger than it is today. It means the creatures would probably have seen amazing coloured lights in the night sky.
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Buck Rogers, Watch Out!
NASA researchers are studying insects and birds, and using "smart" materials with uncanny properties to develop new and mindboggling aircraft designs.
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