(PhysOrg.com) -- NASA's Dawn spacecraft has reached its official approach phase to the asteroid Vesta and will begin using cameras for the first time to aid navigation for an expected July 16 orbital encounter. The large ...
Space Exploration
May 3, 2011
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(PhysOrg.com) -- Late last year, astronomers noticed an asteroid named Scheila had unexpectedly brightened, and it was sporting short-lived plumes. Data from NASA's Swift satellite and Hubble Space Telescope showed these ...
Space Exploration
Apr 28, 2011
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A space mission will soon visit an unusual asteroid called Vesta that may turn out to not be an asteroid at all, but a minor planet.
Space Exploration
Apr 15, 2011
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After three and a half years years of thrusting silently through the void, NASA's Dawn spacecraft is on the threshold of a new world. It's deep in the asteroid belt, less than 4 months from giant asteroid Vesta.
Space Exploration
Apr 8, 2011
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Bombardments of 'micro-meteorites' on Earth and Mars four billion years ago may have caused the planets' climates to cool dramatically, hampering their ability to support life, according to research published today in the ...
Space Exploration
Apr 2, 2011
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(PhysOrg.com) -- On March 29, 1807, German astronomer Heinrich Wilhelm Olbers spotted Vesta as a pinprick of light in the sky. Two hundred and four years later, as NASA's Dawn spacecraft prepares to begin orbiting this intriguing ...
Space Exploration
Mar 30, 2011
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There is an old chestnut about a pedestrian who once asked a virtuoso violinist near Carnegie Hall how to get to the famed concert venue. The virtuoso's answer: practice!
Space Exploration
Mar 11, 2011
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Scientists have performed a micro-probe analysis of the core and outer layers of a pea-sized piece of a meteorite some 4.57 billion years old to reconstruct the history of its formation, providing the first evidence that ...
Astronomy
Mar 3, 2011
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(PhysOrg.com) -- In November 2010, the scientific journal Icarus published a paper by astrophysicists John Matese and Daniel Whitmire, who proposed the existence of a binary companion to our sun, larger than Jupiter, in the ...
Astronomy
Feb 22, 2011
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(PhysOrg.com) -- NASA's NEOWISE mission has completed its survey of small bodies, asteroids and comets, in our solar system. The mission's discoveries of previously unknown objects include 20 comets, more than 33,000 asteroids ...
Space Exploration
Feb 1, 2011
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