Posted May 27th, 2008 by Andrew Popoff
Mars is a cold desert planet with no liquid water on its surface. But in the Martian arctic, water ice lurks just below ground level. Discoveries made by the Mars Odyssey Orbiter in 2002 show large amounts of subsurface water ice in the northern arctic plain. The Phoenix lander targets this circumpolar region using a [...]
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Posted May 2nd, 2008 by Andrew Popoff
A monster storm spawning bolts of lightning 10,000 times more powerful than any seen on Earth is raging on the ringed planet Saturn.
The powerful electrical storm cropped up in Saturn’s southern hemisphere five months ago, when it was first spotted by NASA’s Cassini spacecraft, and has persevered to become the planet’s longest continuously recorded tempest [...]
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Posted April 24th, 2008 by Andrew Popoff
Some families seem blessed with eternal youth, looking much younger than their years. Now, astronomers have found just such a clan of icy objects in the outer solar system. They appear puzzlingly fresh-faced, despite the fact that they probably formed in a collision more than a billion years ago.
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Posted January 11th, 2008 by Andrew Popoff
An asteroid nearing Mars will not crash into the planet later this month, scientists said Wednesday.
New observations of the Mars-bound Asteroid 2007 WD5 have allowed astronomers to refine their predictions for the space rock’s position during its red planet rendezvous on Jan. 30, according an update by NASA’s Near-Earth Object (NEO) program office.
“As a result, [...]
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Posted November 2nd, 2007 by Andrew Popoff
Two galaxies perform an intricate dance in this new Hubble Space Telescope image. The galaxies, containing a vast number of stars, swing past each other in a graceful performance choreographed by gravity.
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Posted August 7th, 2007 by Andrew Popoff
A planet outside our solar system with a year roughly equal to Earth’s has been discovered around a dying, red giant star…
The discovery could help astronomers understand what will happen to our sun’s brood of planets when it exhausts its store of hydrogen fuel and its outer envelope begins to swell. When that happens in [...]
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