JPL
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The precise instruments at the LIGO and Virgo facilities were responsible for past detections of gravitational waves, but now astronomers plan to look for ripples from supermassive black hole collisions using natural detectors in space: pulsars, the “cosmic lighthouses” of the sky.
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A NASA study has analyzed data gathered by the OCO-2 satellite and pinpointed the cause of an unprecedented spike in atmospheric CO2 in 2015 and 2016: the El Nino weather effect caused certain tropical regions to release far more CO2 than they normally would.
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While a lot of attention has been focused on Mars thanks to the rovers that are heading out there in 2020, the Red Planet's tiny moon Phobos has been relatively overlooked. Now the THEMIS camera on NASA's Mars Odyssey orbiter has captured a heat map of what a day looks like on the oddly-shaped moon.
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Last week, Earth was buzzed by asteroid 3122 Florence, the largest space rock NASA has seen come this close since it began tracking near-Earth objects (NEOs). NASA took the opportunity to study Florence close up, confirming its monster size and revealing that it has two tiny moons.
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Even robots exploring other planets need to take some time to unwind and just watch the clouds for a while. The Curiosity rover, which just last week celebrated its fifth anniversary on the Red Planet, has now sent back some of the clearest photos yet taken of extraterrestrial clouds.
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NASA has established the Planetary Defense Coordination Office to detect and track potentially hazardous space rocks and coordinate response plans with the US government if an impact threat arises. Now, NASA will test its detection equipment on a known asteroid that’s due to buzz Earth in October.
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A massive storm bigger than the Earth has been raging for centuries on Jupiter, and now Juno is swooping in for a closer look. It will come within a few thousand miles of the Great Red Spot, probing the storm to hopefully reveal some of its mysteries, and snap some stunning photos in the process.
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NASA is formulating plans to return to the ice giant planets Uranus and Neptune. The agency has conducted a study to determine the scientific focus of these potential missions, the kinds of instruments needed and the logistics of how the spacecraft would get there.
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Because any extraterrestrial life in the Solar System may be very rare, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory is looking at a new technique that is 10,000 times more sensitive than the ones used in the current generations of deep space probes.
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The question of how to track and locate first responders in an involved structure that blocks radio signals has long frustrated firefighters. Could a NASA electromagnetic tracker help them rescue lives without risking theirs?
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In a quest to give robots human-like grace even in the frozen wastes of space, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory is looking at exotic gears made out of exotic material called Bulk Metallic Glass.
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Data from the Hubble Space Telescope has helped solve the mystery of a seemingly impossible starthat has been shedding gigantic "cannonballs" of energetic plasma once every 8.5 years for the past 400 years.
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