NASA has released images of a meteor exploding over the Bering Sea last December with a force over 10 times greater than the atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima in 1945. The giant fireball exploded 16 mi (26 km) above the Earth's surface and is estimated to have released 173 kilotons of energy.
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The landing craft that will deliver Europe's first rover to the planet Mars has arrived for assembly and testing in Turin, Italy, and has been officially named. A key component of the ExoMars 2020 mission, the Roscosmos landing platform has been christened "Kazachok" (Cossack).
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The lack of gravity in space means that muscles begin to waste away, and scientists have been studying these health effects on Earth with extended bed-rest experiments. In the latest, those beds will be put in a centrifuge to mimic artificial gravity, to see if that can help offset the issues.
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Lockheed Martin is rolling out a new class of CubeSat that can be reprogrammed in orbit like a smartphone to take on new missions. The new SmartSat technology is being integrated into over 10 satellite programs to start with and the prototypes will be launched this year.
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Digging into the surface of another planet for the first time is going to bring some surprises, you’d just hope that those surprises don’t include your digging being brought to a halt. This is the dilemma scientists working on the Mars InSight mission have been forced to contend with.
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It's hard to really understand the large-scale structure of the Milky Way. Now, astronomers have peered towards the center of the galaxy using the ESA's X-ray telescope XMM-Newton, and discovered two colossal "chimneys" pumping huge amounts of energy and gas out into intergalactic space.
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The universe is full of fascinating stories, and NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has just spotted a doozy. About 10,000 years ago a star went supernova, and the explosion shot the resulting pulsar off like a cannonball, with enough force to send it hurtling out of the galaxy altogether.
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Humans weren’t built for space travel. The immune system takes a beating, leaving us more vulnerable to infection. Astronauts have now tested a new antimicrobial coating on board the International Space Station (ISS), and found it kept space-faring bugs at bay for well over a year.
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NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft is not due to bring home samples from the asteroid Bennu until some time in 2023, but already it is turning up some fascinating discoveries about this distant world, the latest being a far rockier surface than anticipated.
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When the Gateway outpost is deployed in 2023, it will need an airlock to get any useful work done, so ESA is working on a new egress point for scientific experiments for the cislunar manned laboratory. Based on two independent approaches, the final design will be part of the European module ESPRIT.
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