History's first all-female spacewalk has been cancelled at the last moment due to a problem with the spacesuits. The lack of two spacesuits to fit both women at the same time has forced the space agency to swap one of the team with a male astronaut.
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Jupiter’s Great Red Spot is the most famous storm in the solar system, but similar ones are known to crop up on the other giant planets too. For the first time Hubble has watched one of these huge storms develop on Neptune, shedding new light on their origins.
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If you want life on Mars, add hydrogen and and send down some asteroids. NASA's Curiosity's SAM instrument and laboratory simulations show that the impact of asteroids caused hydrogen in the ancient Martian atmosphere to stimulate the creation of the nitrates required to sustain life.
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A new NASA VR experience is letting viewers explore the chaotic heart of our galaxy from the perspective of the supermassive black hole lurking at its heart, Sagittarius A*. The video was created from a combination of supercomputer simulations and data from the Chandra X-ray Observatory.
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A huge moment of truth for NASA’s Mars 2020 rover will be the so-called “seven minutes of terror,” the period between entry into the atmosphere and touchdown on the surface of Mars. Mission scientists have now begun prepping for this with a round of simulations here on home soil.
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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 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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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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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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