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NASA's Deep Impact spacecraft has completed the commissioning phase of the mission and has moved into the cruise phase.

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Scientists at NASA and the University of Kansas say that a mass extinction on Earth hundreds of millions of years ago could have been triggered by a star explosion called a gamma-ray burst.

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Discovery was rolled from its hangar early this morning to the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB).

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NASA engineers and their industry partners are preparing to test two 20-meter (66-feet) long solar sail propulsion system designs -- a critical milestone in development of a unique propulsion technology using the Sun's energy that could lead to future deep space missions.

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Distant galaxies undergoing intense bursts of star formation have been shown by NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory to be fertile growing grounds for the largest black holes in the Universe.

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NASA's Cassini spacecraft successfully flew by Saturn's moon Titan at a distance of 2,402 kilometers (1,493 miles) on Thursday, March 31. Cassini's multiple instruments are providing new views of the haze-enshrouded world.

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A scaled-down version of the Space Shuttle's Reusable Solid Rocket Motor was successfully tested March 24 at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala.

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Scientists recently discovered a new frontier in the race to find life outside our solar system. Dying red giant stars may bring icy planets back from the dead.

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Astronomers led by an MIT professor have revised the scale used to assess the threat of asteroids and comets colliding with Earth to better communicate those risks with the public.

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NASA has approved up to 18 more months of operations for Spirit and Opportunity, the twin Mars rovers that have already surprised engineers and scientists by continuing active exploration for more than 14 months.

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A hundred years ago, Albert Einstein published his theory of relativity. On this occasion, Euronews' Space magazine plunges into the subject of gravitational waves and features the joint ESA-NASA "LISA" mission which hopes to detect them in space.

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There is a lot of junk orbiting the Earth and the problem will worsen unless there are changes in how spacecraft operators operate. But it is not all doom and gloom. The first steps toward a comprehensive solution are already well underway including a European code of conduct for space debris mitigation.

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An international team of astronomers reports April 29 the confirmation of the discovery of a giant planet, approximately five times the mass of Jupiter, that is gravitationally bound to a young brown dwarf. This discovery puts an end to a yearlong discussion on the nature of this object, which started with the detection of a red object close to the brown dwarf.

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During its closest flyby of Saturn's moon Titan on April 16, the Cassini spacecraft came within 1,027 kilometers (638 miles) of the moon's surface and found that the outer layer of the thick, hazy atmosphere is brimming with complex hydrocarbons.

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Project looked at massive mobile launch platform, shuttle transporter
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — Sandia National Laboratories recently conducted a series of tests to help NASA understand the fatigue on the space shuttle caused during rollout from the Kennedy Space Center assembly building to the launch pad — a four-mile trip.

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Mars rover engineers are using a testing laboratory to simulate specific Mars surface conditions where NASA's rover Opportunity has spun its wheels in a small dune. Careful testing is preceding any commands for Opportunity to resume moving to get out of the dune and continue exploring.

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An interdisciplinary team of scientists thinks it has an answer to a long-standing mystery of why the permanent icecap on Mars' South Pole is offset from the pole itself. Simply put, it's colder and stormier in that hemisphere.

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Scientists on Huygens' Descent Imager Spectral Radiometer (DISR) experiment have generated new views of Saturn's giant moon, Titan.
The European Space Agency's Huygens probe descended onto Titan on January 14, 2005. The University of Arizona-led DISR team released mosaics made from raw, unprocessed images days after Huygens landed, but they continue processing the data.

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Photographs from NASA's Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft released today are the first pictures ever taken of a spacecraft orbiting a foreign planet by another spacecraft orbiting that planet.

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(Caught in the act! Now they won't get away with it after all...)

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The Cassini spacecraft has obtained the most detailed look ever at Saturn's rings, including the B ring, which has eluded previous robotic explorers. Its structure seems remarkably different from its two neighbors, rings A and C.

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A NASA satellite that measures the variability in the amount of the Sun's energy that reaches Earth's atmosphere and impacts our winds, land and oceans has successfully accomplished its five-year primary mission.

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NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft has entered the solar system's final frontier. It is entering a vast, turbulent expanse, where the sun's influence ends and the solar wind crashes into the thin gas between stars.

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The Space Shuttle Discovery is back in the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) at NASA's Kennedy Space Center, Fla. The Shuttle will get a new, modified external fuel tank to ensure a safe Return to Flight mission (STS-114).

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NASA's Mars rover Opportunity is trying to escape from a sand trap, while its twin, Spirit, has been busy finding new clues to a wet and violent early Martian history.

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On July 4, NASA's Deep Impact spacecraft will attempt an extraordinarily daring encounter with the far-flung comet Tempel 1, which is hurtling through space at tens of thousands of miles per hour. As if that is not challenging enough, the comet's size, shape and other characteristics are not entirely known.

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"Our best hypothesis is we're looking at a stack of ash or debris that was explosively erupted from volcanoes and settled down in different ways," Squyres said. "We can't fully rule out the possibility the debris was generated in impact explosions instead of volcanic ones. But we can say, once upon a time, Gusev was a pretty violent place. Big, explosive events were happening, and there was a lot of water around."

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Engineers and mission managers for NASA's Mars Exploration Rover mission cheered when images from the Martian surface confirmed Opportunity had successfully escaped from a sand trap.

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A scientist using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory has found evidence that two white dwarf stars are orbiting each other in a death grip, destined to merge. The data indicate that gravitational waves are carrying energy away from the star system at a prodigious rate - making it a prime candidate for future missions designed to directly detect these subtle ripples in space-time.

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Observations of a cosmic explosion detected on Feb. 15 by two NASA satellites have thrown into doubt one popular explanation for such explosions and have also seriously weakened the argument for yet another, according to University of Chicago astrophysicist Don Lamb. But solving the mystery any time soon may be forestalled by plans to shut down one of the satellites in September.

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Some hardy Earth microbes could survive long enough on Mars to complicate the search for alien life, according to a new study co-authored by University of Florida researchers.

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The world's preeminent planet hunters have discovered the most Earth-like extrasolar planet yet: a possibly rocky world about 7.5 times as massive as the Earth.
This hot "super-Earth," just 15 light years away, travels in a nearly circular orbit only 2 million miles from its parent star, Gliese 876, and has a radius about twice that of Earth.

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An enormous light echo etched in the sky by a fitful dead star was spotted by the infrared eyes of NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope.

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After a voyage of 173 days and 431 million kilometers (268 million miles), NASA's Deep Impact spacecraft will get up-close and personal with comet Tempel 1 on July 4 (EDT).

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NASA's Deep Impact spacecraft observed a massive, short-lived outburst of ice or other particles from comet Tempel 1 that temporarily expanded the size and reflectivity of the cloud of dust and gas (coma) that surrounds the comet nucleus.

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The dry, dusty, treeless expanse of Chile's Atacama Desert is the most lifeless spot on the face of the Earth, and that's why Alison Skelley and Richard Mathies joined a team of NASA scientists there earlier this month.

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Scientists are fascinated by a dark, lake-like feature recently observed on Saturn's moon Titan. NASA's Cassini spacecraft captured a series of images showing a marking, darker than anything else around it. It is remarkably lake-like, with smooth, shore-like boundaries unlike any seen previously on Titan.