Category: Space exploration
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Standing still to go forward…
Nearly a decade after it landed on Mars, NASA’s Opportunity rover is about to get a fresh start. Opportunity’s engineers plan to reformat its flash memory, which is good news, as the rover’s mission has been renewed for another two years, Nature News reports. (1) The more we move on, the more we forget where […]
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Speed of light. Speed of change.
Were physicists all wrong about the speed of light? You might think so, given the stories posted recently about a new paper suggesting that light travels a bit more slowly than the 186,000-miles-a-second figure that’s familiar to generations of science geeks. “The speed of light has almost mythical significance in physics”, Tyson told The Huffington […]
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Primates, astronauts, experiments. The necessary (?) ugly side of science.
When we think about primates in space, we usually think of Ham, the monkey that preceded NASA’s Mercury astronauts on a suborbital Redstone mission. But more than a decade before this notable primate flight there were a series of monkeys named Albert who were also launched to gather data about the effects of spaceflight on […]
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NASA, Mars, extroverts – A guide to the stars…
As NASA focuses considerable effort on a mission to send humans to Mars in the coming decades, psychology researchers are looking at what types of personalities would work the best together on such a long trip. Now, a new study finds that on long-term space missions — such as missions to Mars, which could take […]
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Curiosity, microbes, observing.
A recent study of swabs taken from the rover before it launched found its surfaces contained 65 bacteria species. Engineers are supposed to put spacecraft like Curiosity through a stringent cleaning regimen before launch. Yet certain species of bacteria are known to survive even NASA’s cleanrooms. Wondering about what remained on Curiosity even after cleaning, […]
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