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Spacewalking astronaut Steve Smith talks teamwork lessons in 'Virtual Astronaut' webcast Tuesday

Retired astronaut Steve Smith has faced down some of the more complicated spacewalks in NASA history. He helped repair and upgrade the Hubble Space Telescope not once, but twice. And during his last spaceflight, he helped install a truss that forms the ...

Tiny moonbound spacecraft have very big goals

A coming suite of small probes will help scientists better understand the moon's stores of water ice. Shares. Comments (0). Artist's concept of water ice trapped in sunshine-shy craters on the moon. (Image: © Hongyu Cui/Lunar Trailblazer). When you reflect on ...

Cygnus freighter delivers space toilet and more to astronauts on space station

The astronauts aboard the International Space Station just got nearly 4 tons of new supplies, including a $23 million titanium space toilet. The gear arrived today (Oct. 5) aboard the private robotic Cygnus freighter, which reached the orbiting lab at 5:32 a.m. ...

It took several million years for Arrokothn to acquire its bizarre, pancake-flat shape

The trans-Neptunian object Arrokoth, also known as Ultima Thule, which NASA's space probe New Horizons passed on New Year's Day 2019, may have changed its shape significantly in the first 100 million years since its formation. In today's issue of the ...

Mars is closer to Earth in October than it will be for another 15 years

CNN

CNN

(CNN) If you spied a fiery red star close to the full moon over the weekend, it was actually Mars shining its bright red light in the night sky. The planet will be visible at night throughout October, rising the highest in the sky around midnight each evening.

Normally an insulator, diamond becomes a metallic conductor when subjected to large strain in a new theoretical model

Long known as the hardest of all natural materials, diamonds are also exceptional thermal conductors and electrical insulators. Now, researchers have discovered a way to tweak tiny needles of diamond in a controlled way to transform their electronic ...

Some planets may be better for life than Earth

Earth is not necessarily the best planet in the universe. Researchers have identified two dozen planets outside our solar system that may have conditions more suitable for life than our own. Some of these orbit stars that may be better than even our sun.

Dust dampens albedo effect, spurs snowmelt in the heights of the Himalayas

Dust blowing onto high mountains in the western Himalayas is a bigger factor than previously thought in hastening the melting of snow there, researchers show in a study published Oct. 5 in Nature Climate Change. That's because dust—lots of it in the ...

On the trail of causes of radiation events during space flight

Scientists have made significant progress in understanding the sources of radiation events that could impact human space-flight operations. Relativistic electron precipitation (REP) events are instances when high energy electrons move through areas of ...

Gemini South's high-def version of 'A Star is Born'

NASA's James Webb Space Telescope is still more than a year from launching, but the Gemini South telescope in Chile has provided astronomers a glimpse of what the orbiting observatory should deliver. Using a wide-field adaptive optics camera that ...