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John Glenn, former astronaut and US senator for almost quarter of a century, has died in Ohio aged 95. Glenn became a national hero in 1962 when he became the first American to orbit the Earth, one year after the Soviet Union had sent their own man into orbit, Yuri Gagarin. Glenn was the third US astronaut in space and the first American in orbit, circling the Earth three times. Freebie Link

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Hyperion, one of Saturn's small moons, orbits the planet in such a chaotic manner that it's impossible to predict. Freebie Link

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An uncrewed Russian spacecraft meant to resupply the International Space Station has been lost. Roscosmos, Russias space agency, says that communication with the spacecraft ended 382 seconds into the flight. The third stage of the Soyuz rocket, which helps propel the cargo ship to its final orbit, reportedly shut down earlier than planned according to NASAs live broadcast of the mission. The Progress MS-04 spacecraft never made it into proper orbit without that full third stage burn. Instead, gravity took hold and it burned up in the Earths atmosphere sometime in the hours after the 9:51AM ET launch from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. Reports of explosions and fireballs in the sky of Tuva, Russia around the same time. Freebie Link

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NASA offers live HD Earth viewing from the International Space Station - go full screen, sit back, watch and enjoy home planet. Freebie Link

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International Astronomical Union formally approves 227 star names Freebie Link

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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 2007 in the Gusev crater. The silica is commonly seen in nodular masses that look like cauliflower sprouting out of the ground. Freebie 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 2004. Freebie 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. Freebie 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. Freebie Link

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After more than 20 years 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. Freebie Link

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Happy Halloween! Freebie 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. Freebie 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. Freebie 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 500 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. Freebie Link

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Chinas Shenzhou 11 manned spacecraft has successfully docked with the space lab, where two astronauts will now spend 30 days. Freebie 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 2022. After Monday's launch at 7:30 a.m. (2330 GMT) in the remote northwestern province of Gansu, the astronauts will dock with the Tiangong 2 space laboratory, where they will spend about a month. Freebie 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 30 minutes 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 400 years, astronomers estimate. Freebie Link

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NASA photos reveal only minor space centre damage from Hurricane Matthew Freebie 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 2048 pixels square, so its images have plenty of pixels for print publication. Freebie 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 2015 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. Freebie 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. Freebie Link

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Once Elon Musks SpaceX starts launching its Interplanetary Transport System (ITS) rockets to Mars, it will take 40 to 100 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. Freebie 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. Freebie 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. Freebie 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! Freebie 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. Freebie 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. Freebie 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 2018, OSIRIS will begin an multi-year mission of mapping the 1,650-foot 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. Freebie 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. Freebie 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. Freebie 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 2,600 miles (4,200 kilometers) above Jupiter's swirling clouds. At the time, Juno was traveling at 130,000 mph (208,000 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. Freebie 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. Freebie 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 (40 trillion 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 20 years. With the discovery of Proxima b, the founders of that initiative are even more eager to get going. Freebie 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 2,500 miles (4,200 kilometers) above Jupiter's swirling clouds and traveling at 130,000 mph (208,000 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 2018). 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. Freebie 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 52,000 square foot Spacehab building, which used to belong to the aerospace company now called Astrotech Corporation. The new building will be constructed nearby. Freebie Link

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On Aug. 21, 2016, 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, 2014. 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. Freebie Link

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Due to pervasive light pollution glare from excessive, misaimed and unshielded night lighting 80% 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. Freebie Link

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NASA launches a new public access portal aptly named the NASA-Funded Research Results portal on Freebie 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 7:05 p.m. EDT Thursday, Sept. 8 from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. Freebie Link

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The last time we had an outburst, that is a meteor shower with more meteors than usual, was in 2009. This years Perseid meteor shower is peaking at the moment! Freebie 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. Freebie 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. Freebie 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 30 seconds, and a brief description of the video said the test was "full duration." Freebie Link

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NASA estimates that SpaceX is spending on the order of $300 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 2018. Freebie 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. Freebie Link

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