NASA Announces Mars 2020 Rover Payload to Explore the Red Planet as Never Before
Washington DC (SPX) Aug 01, 2014 -
The next rover NASA will send to Mars in 2020 will carry seven carefully-selected instruments to conduct unprecedented science and exploration technology investigations on the Red Planet.
NASA announced the selected Mars 2020 rover instruments Thursday at the agency's headquarters in Washington. Managers made the selections out of 58 proposals received in January from researchers and engin ...
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Tidal forces gave moon its shape
Santa Cruz CA (SPX) Aug 01, 2014 -
The shape of the moon deviates from a simple sphere in ways that scientists have struggled to explain. A new study by researchers at UC Santa Cruz shows that most of the moon's overall shape can be explained by taking into account tidal effects acting early in the moon's history.
The results, published July 30 in Nature, provide insights into the moon's early history, its orbital evolution ...
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Young binary star system may form planets with weird and wild orbits
Washington DC (SPX) Aug 01, 2014 -
Unlike our solitary Sun, most stars form in binary pairs - two stars that orbit a common center of mass. Though remarkably plentiful, binaries pose a number of questions, including how and where planets form in such complex environments.
While surveying a series of binary stars with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), astronomers uncovered a striking pair of wildly mi ...
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Printing the Metals of the Future
Pasadena CA (JPL) Jul 30, 2014 -
3-D printers can create all kinds of things, from eyeglasses to implantable medical devices, straight from a computer model and without the need for molds. But for making spacecraft, engineers sometimes need custom parts that traditional manufacturing techniques and standard 3-D printers can't create, because they need to have the properties of multiple metals.
Now, researchers at NASA's J ...
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Early Earth suffered 500-million-year asteroid storm
Boulder, Colo. (UPI) Jul 31, 2013 -
Scientists say early Earth would have technically been inhabitable, but it wouldn't have been a very pleasant place to live. Researchers say little pockets of calmer life-sustaining water likely existed amid the boiling seas and giant magma fields.
But any organisms brave enough to carve out a niche on early Earth would have needed to endure extreme conditions, including an asteroid sto ...
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Mars 2020 rover will carry tools to make oxygen
Washington (AFP) July 31, 2014 -
The suite of space-age tools loaded on NASA's next robotic vehicle, bound for the Red Planet in 2020, will include a device for making oxygen out of carbon dioxide.
Designed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Mars Oxygen ISRU (in situ research utilization) Experiment (MOXIE), aims to see if Martian air could be converted for astronauts to breathe.
NASA has sent a series of ...
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Lifetime of gravity measurements heralds new beginning
Paris (ESA) Aug 01, 2014 -
Although ESA's GOCE satellite is no more, all of the measurements it gathered during its life skirting the fringes our atmosphere, including the very last as it drifted slowly back to Earth, have been drawn together to offer new opportunities for science.
Carrying the first 3D gravity sensor in space, this state-of-the-art satellite measured Earth's gravity with unprecedented accuracy.
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