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A cauliflower-shaped structure on Mars has some researchers scratching their heads and others wondering if it could have been created by martian microbes. The Spirit rover discovered pieces of a mineral called opaline silica on Mars in 2 in the Gusev crater. The silica is commonly seen in nodular masses that look like cauliflower sprouting out of the ground. Link

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The most spectacular supermoon since 1948 will light up the sky, appearing 14 per cent bigger and 30 per cent brighter than usual. The event on Monday November 14 - described as "undeniably beautiful" by American space agency Nasa - is the result of the moon coming closer to Earth than it has done for 69 years. Nothing will match it until the moon makes a similar approach on November 25 2034.... At 11.23am UK time on Monday, the gap between the Earth and the moon will close to its shortest point, known as "perigee" - a distance of 221,525 miles (356,510 km). Sky watchers in the UK will have to wait a little longer before the full moon emerges in all its glory shortly before 5pm.

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Executive producers Ron Howard and Brian Grazer previously worked together on Apollo 13, A Brilliant Mind, and From Earth to the Moon. We caught up with them to chat about why Mars captured their attention, and how it felt to make a documentary about the future instead of the past.

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Just when you thought planet had enough doomsday problems to grapple with, Saturn went ahead and changed colors on us. Specifically, Saturns north polea hexagonal vortex that Gizmodo claims could swallow planet whole. While no one knows for certain how Saturns north pole came to be this way, scientists have been tracking its shifting hue thanks to the Cassini Imaging Team, a probe that has been circling the planet since 2 Link

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If you step outside on November 14, you might notice the moon is looking bigger and brighter than usual. Bigger in fact, than it has appeared at any point in the last 68 years, say scientists. This month's supermoon, the penultimate of the year, will be the biggest so far of the 21st century. Link

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The director general of the European Space Agency, a German civil engineer named Johann-Dietrich Woerner, has for more than a year engaged in a charm offensive to unite the primary spacefaring nations. The goal? Creating a village on the Moon. Woerner has pressed his case for the Moon even as his agencys closest ally, NASA and President Obama, have pushed for a human Journey to Mars. Link

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After more than 2 of construction, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is complete and, following in-depth testing, the largest-ever space telescope is expected to launch within two years, NASA officials announced. Link

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Happy Halloween! Link

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The Starliner is one of two spacecraft in development in partnership with NASA's Commercial Crew Program that will enable astronauts to fly to the International Space Station on a new generation of spacecraft made in America and launching from Florida's Space Coast. Link

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It travelled half a billion kilometres across the solar system, deployed its parachute flawlessly and survived a scorching descent through the Martian atmosphere, but the European Space Agency (ESA) has confirmed that its ExoMars lander was lost just one minute before it touched down on the surface of the red planet. Link

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The European Space Agency (Esa) is getting ready to put a probe on Mars. Its Schiaparelli robot will attempt the risky descent to the surface in the coming hours, after a 5 million km journey from Earth. The touchdown is regarded as a dress rehearsal for a much more important venture in four years' time when Esa will bid to place a very expensive rover on the planet. Link

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Chinas Shenzhou 11 manned spacecraft has successfully docked with the space lab, where two astronauts will now spend 3 Link

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China will launch a two-man space mission, Shenzhou 11, on Monday, officials with the space program said, taking the country closer to its ambition of setting up a permanent manned space station by 2 After Monday's launch at 7:3 (233 in the remote northwestern province of Gansu, the astronauts will dock with the Tiangong 2 space laboratory, where they will spend about a month. Link

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Great balls of fire! NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has detected superhot blobs of gas, each twice as massive as the planet Mars, being ejected near a dying star. The plasma balls are zooming so fast through space it would take only 3 for them to travel from Earth to the moon. This stellar "cannon fire" has continued once every 8.5 years for at least the past 4 years, astronomers estimate. Link

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NASA photos reveal only minor space centre damage from Hurricane Matthew Link

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MCC is different from most recent Mars cameras in that it has a very wide field of view, designed so that it is capable of imaging all of Mars' disk when the spacecraft is near the apoapsis of its highly elliptical orbit. It doesn't take crisp high-resolution views of Mars; instead, MCC's value lies in its ability to capture beautifully colored, regional views of the planet that can serve as context images for other missions' more detailed but much more narrowly focused pictures. Its detector is 2 pixels square, so its images have plenty of pixels for print publication. Link

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A star known by the unassuming name of KIC 8462852 in the constellation Cygnus has been raising eyebrows both in and outside of the scientific community for the past year. In 2 a team of astronomers announced that the star underwent a series of very brief, non-periodic dimming events while it was being monitored by NASA's Kepler space telescope, and no one could quite figure out what caused them. A new study has deepened the mystery. Link

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Today's the day. The 12-year-long Rosetta mission will come to an end when the probe crashes into its companion comet, 67P. ESA has sent the final sequence of code to the spacecraft and it is expected to hit the comet shortly before midday today. Link

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Once Elon Musks SpaceX starts launching its Interplanetary Transport System (ITS) rockets to Mars, it will take 4 1 years to achieve a fully self-sustaining civilisation on the Red Planet, the entrepreneur has said. Speaking to the audience at the 67th International Astronautical Congress today, September 27, Musk estimated it would take this long to build a population of one million people. Link

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NASA will host a teleconference at 2 p.m. EDT Monday, Sept. 26, to present new findings from images captured by the agencys Hubble Space Telescope of Jupiters icy moon, Europa. Astronomers will present results from a unique Europa observing campaign that resulted in surprising evidence of activity that may be related to the presence of a subsurface ocean on Europa. Link

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The first catalogue of more than a billion stars from ESAs Gaia satellite was published today the largest all-sky survey of celestial objects to date. On its way to assembling the most detailed 3D map ever made of Milky Way galaxy, Gaia has pinned down the precise position on the sky and the brightness of 1142 million stars. Link

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Enjoy an introduction to the brand new Android app via these in-app screenshots

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The brand new Android version of the Redshift Astronomy app is now available on Google Play! Link

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The layered geologic past of Mars is revealed in stunning detail in new color images returned by NASA's Curiosity Mars rover, which is currently exploring the "Murray Buttes" region of lower Mount Sharp. The new images arguably rival photos taken in U.S. National Parks. Curiosity took the images with its Mast Camera (Mastcam) on Sept. 8. The rover team plans to assemble several large, color mosaics from the multitude of images taken at this location in the near future. Link

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For the second year in succession, this months full moon is eclipsed. A year ago Britain enjoyed the whole of a dramatic total eclipse, but this time we must be content with a less spectacular penumbral one which is already underway at moonrise (and sunset) on 16 September. Link

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After years of construction and months of rigorous testing, NASA's asteroid-sampling OSIRIS-Rex spacecraft is ready to take off from Cape Canaveral this Thursday, September 8th at 7pm ET. After it leaves the atmosphere on an Atlas V rocket, the spacecraft will take two years to reach its destination, a near-Earth asteroid called Bennu. Upon arrival in 2 OSIRIS will begin an multi-year mission of mapping the 1,65 asteroid and bringing home a scoop of carbon-rich space rocks, which researchers believe may hold 4.5 billion-year-old leftovers from the beginning of the solar system and some of the basic building blocks of life. Link

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In a final twist to a love story of galactic proportions, the long-missing Philae lander has been found by its companion satellite, Rosetta. Images from the Rosetta probe show the tiny lander wedged between some rocks on the icy comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. The discovery comes barely a month after the Philae lander tweeted a heartbreaking final farewell to the world. Link

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NEWS The final release date for the brand new Android version of the Redshift Planetarium app on the Google Play store is September 14th!

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NASAs Juno spacecraft has sent back the first-ever images of Jupiters north pole, taken during the spacecrafts first flyby of the planet with its instruments switched on. The images show storm systems and weather activity unlike anything previously seen on any of solar systems gas-giant planets. Link

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NASA's Juno mission successfully executed its first of 36 orbital flybys of Jupiter today. The time of closest approach with the gas-giant world was 6:44 a.m. PDT (9:44 a.m. EDT, 13:44 UTC) when Juno passed about 2,6 miles (4,2 kilometers) above Jupiter's swirling clouds. At the time, Juno was traveling at 130,0 mph (208,0 kilometers per hour) with respect to the planet. This flyby was the closest Juno will get to Jupiter during its prime mission. "Early post-flyby telemetry indicates that everything worked as planned and Juno is firing on all cylinders," said Rick Nybakken, Juno project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. Link

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Six scientists have completed a year-long simulation of a Mars mission, during which they lived in a dome in near-isolation. The group lived in the dome on a Mauna Loa mountain in Hawaii and were only allowed to go outside if wearing spacesuits. On Sunday the simulation ended and the scientists emerged. Link

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A potentially Earth-like planet has been discovered orbiting a star located right next door to the sun. Should humanity try to send a probe there as soon as possible? The newly discovered planet, known as Proxima b, orbits the star Proxima Centauri, the closest star to the sun. Proxima Centauri is about 4.22 light-years or 25 trillion miles (4 kilometers) from Earth. That's a daunting distance. But an initiative announced earlier this year aims to send superfast miniature probes to Proxima Centauri, on a journey that would take about 2 With the discovery of Proxima b, the founders of that initiative are even more eager to get going. Link

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This Saturday at 5:51 a.m. PDT, (8:51 a.m. EDT, 12:51 UTC) NASA's Juno spacecraft will get closer to the cloud tops of Jupiter than at any other time during its prime mission. At the moment of closest approach, Juno will be about 2,5 miles (4,2 kilometers) above Jupiter's swirling clouds and traveling at 130,0 mph (208,0 kilometers per hour) with respect to the planet. There are 35 more close flybys of Jupiter scheduled during its prime mission (scheduled to end in February of 2 The Aug. 27 flyby will be the first time Juno will have its entire suite of science instruments activated and looking at the giant planet as the spacecraft zooms past. Link

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SpaceX plans to lease one building and construct a newer second building at Port Canaveral, just two miles from where it launches its Falcon 9 rockets from the Cape Canaveral space pad, port chief John Murray tells Flordia Today. The company plans on leasing the former 52, square foot Spacehab building, which used to belong to the aerospace company now called Astrotech Corporation. The new building will be constructed nearby. Link

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On Aug. 21, 2 contact was reestablished with one of NASA's Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatories, known as the STEREO-B spacecraft, after communications were lost on Oct. 1, 2 Over 22 months, the STEREO team has worked to attempt contact with the spacecraft. Most recently, they have attempted a monthly recovery operation using NASA's Deep Space Network, or DSN, which tracks and communicates with missions throughout space. Link

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Due to pervasive light pollution glare from excessive, misaimed and unshielded night lighting 8 of Europe and North America no longer experiences real darkness. For anyone living near a major metropolis, a satellite image of the Milky Way seems abstract we understand it to be a document of something true, but understanding is purely theoretical. In 1994, after a predawn earthquake cut power to most of Los Angeles, the Griffith Observatory received phone calls from spooked residents asking about the strange sky. What those callers were seeing were stars. Link

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NASA launches a new public access portal aptly named the NASA-Funded Research Results portal on Link It reflects the agencys ongoing commitment to providing broad public access to science data.

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NASA is preparing to launch its first mission to return a sample of an asteroid to Earth. The mission will help scientists investigate how planets formed and how life began, as well as improve understanding of asteroids that could impact Earth. The Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer (OSIRIS-REx) spacecraft will travel to the near-Earth asteroid Bennu and bring a sample back to Earth for intensive study. Launch is scheduled for 7: p.m. EDT Thursday, Sept. 8 from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. Link

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The last time we had an outburst, that is a meteor shower with more meteors than usual, was in 2 This years Perseid meteor shower is peaking at the moment! Link

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We have some great news for you all - as per popular demand, we have developed a brand new Android version of the Redshift Planetarium app which is due to launch on Wednesday September 7th! Keep your eyes open for more updates closer to the date.

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NASA's Cassini spacecraft has found deep, steep-sided canyons on Saturn's moon Titan that are flooded with liquid hydrocarbons. The finding represents the first direct evidence of the presence of liquid-filled channels on Titan, as well as the first observation of canyons hundreds of meters deep. Link

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SpaceX appears to have taken a significant step forward with the development of a key component of its Mars mission architecture. According to multiple reports, during the Small Satellite Conference Tuesday in Logan, Utah, SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell said the company has shipped a Raptor engine to its test site in MacGregor, Texas. Link

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Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk's private spaceflight company, SpaceX, is another step closer to making its Falcon 9 rockets fully reusable. On July 28, the company released this video of its first test firing of a used Falcon 9 rocket stage, one that already launched and landed during a mission in May. The burn lasted for about 2 minutes and 3 and a brief description of the video said the test was "full duration." Link

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NASA estimates that SpaceX is spending on the order of $3 million on its Red Dragon Mars lander mission, a down payment on the companys long-term ambitions for human Mars missions. At a meeting of the NASA Advisory Councils technology committee in Cleveland July 26, Jim Reuter, deputy associate administrator for programs in NASAs space technology mission directorate, provided an overview of NASAs agreement with SpaceX, announced in April, to support that companys plans for an uncrewed Mars landing mission that could launch as soon as May 2 Link

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Jupiter's famous red spot may actually provide the energy that heats the planet's upper atmosphere to incredibly high temperatures claims a new study. As the largest planet in Solar System, Jupiter is five times further away from the Sun than Earth and yet its temperatures are similar to those found above home planet. Link

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After almost two years of extreme highs and devastating lows, the Philae lander bids its final farewell tomorrow. At 1 BST on July 27, the Electrical Support System Processor Unit (ESS) on Rosetta will be switched off. The ESS is used to communicate between Rosetta and its lander. Link

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Astronomers used NASAs Hubble Space Telescope to conduct the first atmospheric study of Earth-sized exoplanets and found evidence to suggest that two could be habitable. The planets have astronomers excited because atmospheric analysis revealed that theyre likely to be rocky worlds, the type of planet necessary to host life as we know it. Link

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Scientists unearth two rocky planets in 'habitable zone' of their star Link

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The American space agency's new Juno mission to Jupiter has returned its first imagery since going into orbit around the gas giant last week. The picture shows a sunlit portion of the planet, together with three of its big moons - Io, Europa and Ganymede. Link

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A NASA camera on board the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) satellite captured a rare lunar transit across the face of a sunlit Earth. The images, which feature a fully lit far side of the moon, were captured between July 4 at 11:5 ET and July 5 at 3:18 am ET. Link

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