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Imagine a shift in the Earth so profound that it could force our entire planet to spin on its side after a few million years, tilting it so far that Alaska would sit at the equator. Princeton scientists have now provided the first compelling evidence that this kind of major shift may have happened in our world's distant past.

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Planetary scientists have discovered the highest clouds above any planetary surface. They found them above Mars using the SPICAM instrument on board ESA's Mars Express spacecraft. The results are a new piece in the puzzle of how the Martian atmosphere works.

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Right up to its final orbits, SMART-1 continued delivering valuable data, extending the mission's legacy as a technology and scientific success. Scientists and engineers met today at ESOC to review mission achievements including final AMIE camera images.

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This NASA Hubble Space Telescope image is a never-before-seen astronomical alignment of a moon traversing the face of Uranus, and its accompanying shadow. The white dot near the center of Uranus’ blue-green disk is the icy moon Ariel. The 700-mile-diameter satellite is casting a shadow onto the cloud tops of Uranus.

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NASA's Mars rover Opportunity is closing in on what may be the grandest overlook and richest science trove of its long mission.

During the next two weeks, the robotic geologist is likely to reach the rim of a hole in the Martian surface wider and deeper than any it has visited. The crater, known as "Victoria," is approximately 750 meters (half a mile) wide and 70 meters (230 feet) deep.

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A new image from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope is helping astronomers understand how stardust is recycled in galaxies.

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The Space Shuttle Atlantis and its six-member crew are on their way to the International Space Station after lifting-off from NASA's Kennedy Space Center, Fla., at 11:14:55 a.m. EDT Saturday.

"It's been almost four years, two Return to Flight missions, a tremendous amount of work by thousands of individuals to get the shuttle program back to where we are right now and that's on the verge of restarting the station assembly sequence," said Atlantis' Commander Brent Jett.

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Space Shuttle Atlantis was today successfully launched from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, the United States. During the 10-day STS-115 mission the six crew members will install a second set of solar panels on the International Space Station – marking an important return to major Station assembly work.

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Astronomers using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope have photographed one of the smallest objects ever seen around a normal star beyond our Sun. Weighing in at 12 times the mass of Jupiter, the object is small enough to be a planet. The riddle is that it is also large enough to be a brown dwarf, a failed star.

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Solar flares are tremendous explosions on the surface of our Sun, releasing as much energy as a billion megatons of TNT in the form of radiation, high energy particles and magnetic fields.

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A systematic search for the first bright galaxies to form in the early universe has revealed a dramatic jump in the number of such galaxies around 13 billion years ago. These observations of the earliest stages in the evolution of galaxies provide new evidence for the hierarchical theory of galaxy formation--the idea that large galaxies built up over time as smaller galaxies collided and merged.

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PASADENA, Calif.--The International Astronomical Union (IAU) today announced that the dwarf planet known as Xena since its 2005 discovery has been named Eris, after the Greek goddess of discord.

Eris's moon will be known as Dysnomia, the demon goddess of lawlessness and the daughter of Eris.

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NASA's Mars robotic missions are performing so well, they are being prepared for additional overtime work.

The team operating the twin Mars Exploration Rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, since January 2004, won approval for an additional year of exploration.

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NASA's Mars Rover Opportunity has arrived at the rim of a crater approximately five times wider than a previous stadium-sized one it studied for half a year.

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The 2006 Nobel Prize for physics has been awarded to Americans John C. Mather and George F. Smoot for their work on NASA’s 1989 Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) satellite.

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Co-ordinated efforts by China/ESA’s Double Star and ESA’s Cluster spacecraft have allowed scientists to zero in on an area where energetic particles from the Sun are blasting their way through the Earth’s magnetic shield. Solar material penetrating the Earth's magnetic shield can represent a hazard to both astronauts and satellites.

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Astronomers have found possible proofs of stellar vampirism in the globular cluster 47 Tucanae. Using ESO's Very Large Telescope, they found that some hot, bright, and apparently young stars in the cluster present less carbon and oxygen than the majority of their sisters. This indicates that these few stars likely formed by taking their material from another star.

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As NASA's next generation spacecraft matures, engineers will document its design with today's electronic equivalent to the blueprint. But diagrams, three-dimensional or not, only go so far in helping engineers understand what layouts best suit the job at hand and the humans involved.

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Long periods of total darkness and poor soil needn't stop an avid gardener – at least not one who's willing to go out of this world to grow plants.

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NASA scientists and their international partners using the new Japanese Suzaku satellite have collected a startling new set of black hole observations, revealing details of twisted space and warped time never before seen with such precision.

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NASA’s STEREO (Solar TErrestrial RElations Observatory) spacecraft – en route as the first mission to capture the sun in 3-D – successfully launched tonight aboard a single Delta II vehicle from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Fla., at 8:52 p.m. EDT.

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The COROT space telescope is proceeding smoothly towards its launch in December 2006. Once in orbit, COROT will become the first spacecraft devoted to the search for rocky planets, similar to our own Earth.

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Hubble has returned to the intriguing variable star V838 Monocerotis many times since its initial outburst in 2002, [...]
Light from this sudden eruption is illuminating the interstellar dust surrounding the star,

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NASA Administrator Michael Griffin announced plans for a fifth servicing mission to Hubble Tuesday during a meeting with agency employees at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. Goddard is the agency center responsible for managing Hubble. Astronauts will use the Space Shuttle to bring new instruments to Hubble along with gyros, batteries and other devices crucial for the telescope’s continued success through the year 2013. At the end of SM4, Hubble will be at the peak of its capabilities.

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Frenzied star-making in the Milky Way Galaxy starting about 2400 million years ago had extraordinary effects on life on Earth. [...] They were most intense during a baby boom of stars, many of which blew up.

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Scientists using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope have discovered that dark energy is not a new constituent of space, but rather has been present for most of the universe's history. Dark energy is a mysterious repulsive force that causes the universe to expand at an increasing rate. Investigators used Hubble to find that dark energy was already boosting the expansion rate of the universe as long as nine billion years ago.

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Rent, own or build a community at NASA’s Johnson Space Center. Deed title price: $1.8 million.

By popular vote, the Johnson Space Center landed a space in the classic property trading game of Monopoly.

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NASA has unveiled the initial elements of the Global Exploration Strategy and a proposed U.S. lunar architecture, two critical tools for achieving the nation's vision of returning humans to the moon.

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NASA's twin Mars rovers, nearing the third anniversary of their landings, are getting smarter as they get older.

The unexpected longevity of Spirit and Opportunity is giving the space agency a chance to field-test on Mars some new capabilities useful both to these missions and future rovers.

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NASA's Cassini spacecraft has found lakes on Saturn's moon Titan.

The lakes are most likely the source of hydrocarbon smog in the frigid moon's atmosphere. Finding the source of the complex soup of hydrocarbons in Titan's atmosphere has been a major goal for the Cassini mission and is a significant accomplishment.

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An international team of astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has created a three-dimensional map that provides the first direct look at the large-scale distribution of dark matter in the universe.

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A team of scientists using Oak Ridge National Laboratory supercomputers has discovered the first plausible explanation for a pulsar's spin that fits the observations made by astronomers.

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We may already have ‘met’ Martian organisms, according to a paper presented Sunday (Jan. 7) at the meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Seattle.

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If indeed "a diamond is forever," the most primitive origins of Earth's so-called black diamonds were in deep, universal time, geologists have discovered. Black diamonds came from none other than interstellar space.

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Astronomers have found an enormous halo of stars bound to the Andromeda galaxy and extending far beyond the swirling disk seen in images of the famous galaxy, our nearest large galactic neighbor.

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The Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) and Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) are two of the Milky Way's closest neighboring galaxies.

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Astronomers have discovered the most distant population of star clusters ever seen, hidden behind one of the nearest such clusters to Earth.

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The high-resolution camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has imaged the 1997 landing site of NASA's Mars Pathfinder, revealing new details of hardware on the surface and the geology of the region.

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Two years ago, planetary scientists across the world watched as Europe and the US did something amazing. The Huygens descent module drifted down through the hazy atmosphere of Saturn's moon Titan, beaming its data back to Earth via the Cassini mothership. Today, Huygens's data are still continuing to surprise researchers.

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At the surface of Titan, Huygens measured the temperature to be 94 ºK (-179 ºC) with a humidity of 45 percent.