NASA's New Horizons spacecraft has made its first detection of its next flyby target, the Kuiper Belt object nicknamed Ultima Thule, more than four months ahead of its New Year's 2019 close encounter.
Space Exploration
Aug 29, 2018
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Successfully observing an object from more than four billion miles away is difficult, yet NASA's New Horizons mission team is banking that they can do that—again.
Space Exploration
Aug 2, 2018
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10
Degradation rates of oil were slower in the dark and cold waters of the depths of the Gulf of Mexico than at surface conditions, according to an international team of geoscientists trying to understand where the oil went ...
Environment
Jul 19, 2018
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8
Until 2015, it was not known whether Pluto or its largest moon, Charon, had mountains or valleys or even impact craters. After the spectacular success of New Horizons in July 2015, scientists were amazed at the towering ...
Space Exploration
Jul 10, 2018
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80
Eight years ago, when the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded and sank off Louisiana, one of the big problems facing scientists trying to assess the damage caused by the oil spill was that no one knew much about what lives in ...
Ecology
Jul 9, 2018
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26
The scientific collaborations LIGO and Virgo have detected gravitational waves from the fusion of two black holes, inaugurating a new era in the study of the cosmos. But what if those ripples of space-time were not produced ...
Astronomy
Jun 12, 2018
28
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NASA's New Horizons spacecraft is back "awake" and being prepared for the farthest planetary encounter in history – a New Year's Day 2019 flyby of the Kuiper Belt object nicknamed Ultima Thule.
Space Exploration
Jun 6, 2018
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Scientists have discovered dunes on Pluto, and say they are likely to have been formed of methane ice grains released into its rarefied atmosphere.
Space Exploration
May 31, 2018
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205
Two new studies have shown that sunlight transforms oil spills on the ocean surface more significantly and quickly than previously thought. The phenomenon considerably limits the effectiveness of chemical dispersants, which ...
Environment
Apr 25, 2018
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42
Can we tell black holes apart? Astrophysicists at Frankfurt, the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn, and Nijmegen, collaborating in the project BlackHoleCam, answer this question by computing the first images ...
Astronomy
Apr 17, 2018
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