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News: Pluto Has a Blue Sky and Water Ice, NASA Announces

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Pluto

Pluto has a blue sky, NASA announced today, offering up more information revealed by the New Horizons probe’s visit to the planet last month: Pluto’s haze layer shows its blue color in this picture taken by the New Horizons Ralph/Multispectral Visible Imaging Camera (MVIC). The high-altitude haze is thought to be similar in nature to that seen at Saturn’s moon Titan. The source of both hazes likely involves sunlight-initiated chemical reactions of nitrogen and methane, leading to relatively small, soot-like particles (called tholins) that grow as they settle toward the surface. This image was generated by software that combines information … Read more

News: Watch as Astronauts Eat First Crops Grown in Space

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Nasa harvest

“A crop of lettuce has been harvested from the ISS plant growth system dubbed Veg-01, Nasa’s plant experiment being used to study how plants can be grown in micro-gravity,” NASA’s official YouTube reads. According to Science Recorder: “Expedition 44 crew members, including US. astronaut Scott Kelly, harvested their first crop of ‘Outredgeous’ red romaine lettuce from the orbiting laboratory. They will clean the greens with citric acid-based, food-safe sanitizing wipes before consuming them.” See the Full Story at Passport

News: NASA Discovers Global Underground Ocean on Saturn’s Moon Enceladus

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Planning a sea-faring vacation to escape from the rest of the world? Don’t discount Saturn’s moon Enceladus, as NASA has just released new research that indicates a global ocean lies underneath its icy surface. Using research from the Cassini-Huygens spacecraft that is scheduled to make a flyby of Enceladus on October 28, NASA was able to detect a slight wobble on the moon that researchers say can only be accounted for by a underground ocean. “This was a hard problem that required years of observations, and calculations involving a diverse collection of disciplines, but we are confident we finally got … Read more

News: Stunning New Photos from Pluto

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Pluto

A new set of images has been received from the New Horizons spacecraft, showing close-up images of Pluto taken on July 15 (and only just recently processed) while it was passing by the dwarf planet at high speed — but not so fast it couldn’t see terrain so varied it’s astonishing astronomers. “If an artist had painted this Pluto before our flyby, I probably would have called it over the top — but that’s what is actually there,” said the mission’s principal investigator, Alan Stern, in a NASA release. With wide plains, mountains and valleys, deltas implying moving liquids, and … Read more

News: NASA’s three-billion-mile journey to Pluto reaches historic encounter

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To boldly go indeed! NASA’s three-billion-mile journey to Pluto reaches historic encounter After a decade-long journey through our solar system, New Horizons made its closest approach to Pluto Tuesday, about 7,750 miles above the surface — roughly the same distance from New York to Mumbai, India — making it the first-ever space mission to explore a world so far from Earth. See the full article

New Photos of Saturn’s Moon Rhea

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Rhea

After a couple of years in high-inclination orbits that limited its ability to encounter Saturn’s moons, NASA’s Cassini spacecraft returned to Saturn’s equatorial plane in March 2015. As a prelude to its return to the realm of the icy satellites, the spacecraft had its first relatively close flyby of an icy moon (apart from Titan) in almost two years on Feb. 9. During this encounter Cassini’s cameras captured images of the icy moon Rhea, as shown in these in two image mosaics. The views were taken about an hour and a half apart as Cassini drew closer to Rhea. Images … Read more

NASA’s Dawn Spacecraft Orbits A Dwarf Planet

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Ceres

NASA’s Dawn spacecraft made history at 4:39 a.m. PST Friday morning when it reached Ceres and became the first man-made object to orbit a dwarf planet. According to NASA, the objective of the Dawn mission is to “study the asteroid Vesta and dwarf planet Ceres, celestial bodies believed to have accreted early in the history of the solar system. The mission will characterize the early solar system and the processes that dominated its formation.” Dawn was launched from Cape Canaveral in September 2007, with an ultimate destination of the asteroid belt that lies between Mars and Jupiter. Dawn’s first target … Read more