KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, FL - Following SpaceX's "exceptional performance" launching an immensely powerful broadband satellite on their maiden mission for Inmarsat this week on a Falcon 9 rocket, the company CEO told Universe Today that Inmarsat was willing to conduct future launches with SpaceX - including on a "reusable rocket in the future!"
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A new BBC documentary called "The Day The Dinosaurs Died" explains how things might have been different for the dinosaurs if the asteroid that caused their extinction had hit deeper ocean.
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Had your fill of binocular comets? Turns out, 2017 may have saved the best for last. The past few months has seen a steady stream of dirty snowball visitations to the inner solar system, both short term periodic and long term hyperbolic. First let's run through the cometary roll call for the first part of the year: 41P Tuttle-Giacobini-Kresák, 2P/Encke, 45P Honda-Markov-Padjudašáková, C/2015 ER61 PanSTARRS and finally, the latecomer to the party, C/2017 E4 Lovejoy.
Next up is a comet with a much easier to pronounce (and type) name, at least to the English-speaking tongue: C/2015 V2 Johnson.
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A new study has revealed how human activity has been affected the near-space environment, creating a bubble that protects against space radiation.
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Using data provided by the Dawn probe, which now orbits between Ceres and the Sun (at opposition), NASA has created a new movie of the protoplanet
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According to a series of simulations conducted by scientists from the University of Exeter and the Met Office, it is possible that Proxima b is indeed habitable
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A new study by a team of researchers from UBC proposes a new vision of Dark Energy, where fluctuations in spacetime allow for a net expanding effect that is slowly accelerating
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NASA's EPIC camera aboard NOAA's DSCOVR spacecraft solves decades old mystery that stymied Carl Sagan. Mysterious flashes are mysterious no more.
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KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, FL - SpaceX blasted the "largest and most complicated communications satellite ever built to orbit" for London based Inmarset at twilight this evening, May 15, from NASA's Kennedy Space Center aboard an expendable Falcon 9 rocket. In fact the Inmarsat 5F4 satellite is so powerful that it has the potential to reach "hundreds of millions of customers" the Inmarsat CEO Rupert Pierce told Universe Today in a post launch interview.
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A new study addresses the possibility of being able to observe alien megastructures around nearby pulsars using current instruments
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Located in the Orion Constellation (just below the belt), between 1,324 and 1,364 light years from Earth, is the famous star-forming region known as the Orion Nebula.
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A new paper on supernovae and the effects on Earth increases the so-called "Supernova Kill-Zone" to 50 light years.
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KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, FL - SpaceX is targeting twilight thunder with the firms Falcon 9 rocketing skyward from the Florida Space Coast on Monday 15 carrying a commercial High-Speed broadband satellite for London based Inmarsat.
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KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, FL - After conducting a thorough review examining the feasibility of adding a two person crew to the first integrated launch of America's new Space Launch System (SLS) megarocket and Orion capsule on a mission that would propel two astronauts to the Moon and back by late 2019, NASA nixed the proposal during a media briefing held Friday.
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A new study by a research team from the Max Planck Institute may have found a black hole that was kicked from its galaxy during a merger
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KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, FL - SpaceX is all set to continue their absolutely torrid launch pace in 2017 with a commercial High-Speed broadband satellite for Inmarsat on May 15 following Thursday's successful completion of a critical static hot-fire test of the first stage. Watch our video below.
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According to a new study from Brown University, impacts on Mars could have triggered supersonic storms that scoured the surface
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Ancient grains of the mineral zircon help researchers paint a picture of Earth in the Hadean Eon, and that picture is mostly water.
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Located in the southern sky is the small Chamaeleon constellation, an asterism that was first defined in the 16th century.
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A research team from Arizona State University is developing a seismometer that could be mounted a lander mission to Europa to listen to its interior
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The Super Telescopes are set to advance our understanding of the Universe, and it can all be traced back to Galileo.
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NASA's LUVOIR, the Large Ultraviolet, Optical, and Infrared Surveyor, is the future of Super Telescopes. It's 15m mirror will dwarf the Hubble and James Webb.
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So, are you excited for the 2017 movie season? U.S. Memorial Day weekend is almost upon us, and that means big ticket, explosion-laden sci-fi flicks and reboots/sequels. Lots of sequels. We recently got a chance to check out Alien: Covenant opening Thursday, May 18th as the second prequel and the seventh (if you count 2004's Alien vs. Predator) in the Alien franchise.
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Measuring about 91 billion light years in diameter and being 13.8 billion years old, the Universe encompasses all matter, energy, time and space in existence.
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In the coming weeks, the Cassini probe will getting a better glimpse at the hexagonal storm around its northern polar region, as part of its Grand Finale
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A Near Earth Object (NEO) passed Earth at a distance of about 3.7 Lunar Distances on May 8th, 2017, passing Earth by a wide margin.
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The stars look static in the sky, but are they moving? How fast, and how do we know? What events can make them move faster, and how can humans make them move?
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Have you been following the Springtime parade of bright comets? Thus far, the Oort cloud has offered up several fine binocular comets, including Comet 2/P Encke, 41/P Tuttle-Giacobini-Kresak, 45/P Honda-Mrkos-Pajdusakova, C/2016 U1 NEOWISE and C/2017 E4 Lovejoy. Now, another comet joins the dawn ranks, as it brightens up ahead of expectations: 2015 ER61 PanSTARRS.
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For the past few decades, scientists have been of the opinion that beneath its swirling clouds of gas, Jupiter may have a solid core.
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Located 10.5 light years away, and filled with asteroid belts and a debris disk, the Epsilon Eridani system is basically what our Solar System was like when it was young
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KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, FL - This week SpaceX blasted their first top secret surveillance satellite to orbit for America's spy chiefs at National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) - affording magnificent viewing and imagery from the Florida Space Coast.
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To ensure that their Pleiades supercomputer can keep up with future missions, NASA and TopCoder are hosting the High Performance Fast Computing Challenge.
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At a Senate hearing, SpaceX laid out its vision to provide global access to broadband internet with a "constellation of satellites".
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A team of researchers using the Chandra X-Ray Observatory have spotted a wave of hot gas larger than the Milky Way in the Perseus galaxy cluster.
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Located along the ecliptic plane is the Cetus constellation, the fourth largest constellation in the sky and one of the original 48 listed in the Amalgest.
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Elizabeth Turtle , a researcher at NASA's JHUAPL, reveals the latest details of "the Dragonfly" - a proposal for an aerial vehicle that could explore Titan in the coming decades.
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Between proposals for missions to the Moon and Mars in the coming decades, JAXA is proposing a mission to the moons of Mars.
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A new image of the Small Magellanic Cloud reveals its population of stars in stunningly rich detail.
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A team from MIT (with support from NASA) is building an instrument that will be able to test for signs of life in-situ, and on other planets and moons.
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Science fiction has promised us a rocket that blasts off into space without stages. How close is reality to the science fiction dream of a single stage to orbit?
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Enjoy the wonder of seeing bits of Halley's Comet rain down as the Eta Aquariid meteors Saturday morning.
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