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December 13, 2012

Student Team Provides Real-Time Video of Asteroid Toutatis
Brookline MA (SPX) Dec 13, 2012
An asteroid that some day might threaten Earth is passing relatively close by on the night of December 11-12, and its gliding path among the stars will be tracked by a team of high-school students at the Clay Center Observatory in Brookline, Massachusetts. The asteroid, known as 4179 Toutatis, is a lumpy, elongated object roughly 3 miles (5 km) long. It circles the Sun in a looping oval that ranges from just inside Earth's orbit to well beyond Mars. This orbit is unstable, and some day Toutatis mi ... read more

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Cassini Spots Mini Nile River on Saturn Moon Scientists with NASA's Cassini mission have spotted what appears to be a miniature, extraterrestrial likeness of Earth's Nile River: a river valley on Saturn's moon Titan that stretches more than 20 ... more		New knowledge about the remarkable properties of black holes Black holes are surrounded by many mysteries, but now researchers from the Niels Bohr Institute, among others, have come up with new groundbreaking theories that can explain several of their propert ... more		Big Asteroid Tumbles Harmlessly Past Earth This week, NASA's Goldstone radar is tracking a large asteroid as it passes by Earth, and obtaining images of unprecedented clarity. "At closest approach on Dec. 12th, asteroid 4179 Toutatis will be ... more
				Greedy black hole discovered in Andromeda Studying the Andromeda galaxy with ESA's XMM-Newton X-ray space observatory, astronomers have discovered a new bright X-ray source that hosts a stellar-mass black hole accreting mass at a very high ... more		An Older Vega: New Insights About The Star All Others Are Measured By Vega, a star astronomers have used as a touchstone to measure other stars' brightness for thousands of years, may be more than 200 million years older than previously thought. That's according to ne ... more

CubeSats, SmallSats and MicroSats

Mining ancient ores for clues to early life An analysis of sulfide ore deposits from one of the world's richest base-metal mines confirms that oxygen levels were extremely low on Earth 2.7 billion years ago, but also shows that microbes were ... more		Hubble's Glitter galaxy: The ESO 318-13 galaxy The brilliant cascade of stars through the middle of this image is the galaxy ESO 318-13 as seen by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. Despite being located millions of light-years from Earth, the ... more		US Navy And Lockheed Martin Deliver Secure Communications Satellite For Mobile Users Second Generation Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense System Intercepts Ballistic Missile Target Northrop Grumman Proves Concept for New B-2 Satellite Communication System Making frequency-hopping radios practical F-35A Completes High Angle Of Attack Testing Carrier-based unmanned jet launch set to open new markets Gunmen kill two NATO drivers in Pakistan: officials		Fermi Improves its Vision for Thunderstorm Gamma-Ray Flashes Thanks to improved data analysis techniques and a new operating mode, the Gamma-ray Burst Monitor (GBM) aboard NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope is now 10 times ... more
				Unvieling diffuse x-ray emission from nearby galaxies NASA will launch an astrophysics mission to study the Diffuse X-ray emission from the Local galaxy (DXL) December 9 from the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico. The goal of this flight is ... more		Do we live in a computer simulation? UW researchers say idea can be tested A decade ago, a British philosopher put forth the notion that the universe we live in might in fact be a computer simulation run by our descendants. While that seems far-fetched, perhaps even incomp ... more

Solar systems for home and business

CubeSats, SmallSats and MicroSats

Tempur-Pedic Mattress Comparison & Memory Foam Mattress Review

NASA Astrobiology Institute Shows How Wide Binary Stars Form Using computer simulations, scientists from the NASA Astrobiology Institute team at the University of Hawaii are shedding light on a question that has challenged astronomers for years: What causes w ... more		Nearby star much older than thought The star Vega, used as a "yardstick" to gage other stars' brightness for thousands of years, may be much older than previously thought, U.S. astronomers say. ... more		Research into carbon storage in Arctic tundra reveals unexpected insight into ecosystem resiliency World's melting glaciers making large contribution to sea rise H1N1 discovered in marine mammals TD Alvin Marks Starts Of US Hurricane Season Sea level: One-third of its rise comes from melting mountain glaciers Corals turn to algae for stored food when times get tough Tropical air circulation drives fall warming on Antarctic Peninsula		Apollo's Lunar Dust Data Being Restored Forty years after the last Apollo spacecraft launched, the science from those missions continues to shape our view of the moon. In one of the latest developments, readings from the Apollo 14 and 15 ... more
				Rock Comet Meteor Shower Every year in mid-December, astronomers look up in the sky and witness a mystery. It announces itself with a flurry of shooting stars. For several nights in a row, dozens to hundreds of meteors per ... more		Search for life extends to the stars Nighttime flights on an airborne observatory to search newly born stars could turn up evidence of the presence of precursors to life, U.S. astrobiologists say. ... more

Halfway Between Uranus and Neptune, New Horizons Cruises On

Dwarf planet Makemake lacks atmosphere

Keck Observations Bring Weather Of Uranus Into Sharp Focus

Mining ancient ores for clues to early life

Search for life extends to the stars

Can life emerge on planets around cooling stars?

Astronomers discover and 'weigh' infant solar system

Search for Life Suggests Solar Systems More Habitable than Ours

Do missing Jupiters mean massive comet belts?

Charitum Montes: a cratered winter wonderland

Opportunity Continues Rock Studies

Curiosity Rover Nearing Yellowknife Bay

	British astronomer Patrick Moore dead aged 89 Astronomer Patrick Moore, renowned for his work mapping the Moon's surface and for having popularised his subject with the British public, died Sunday at the age of 89, friends and colleagues announced. ... more		To the moon and back for less than 2 billion dollars Two former top NASA officials unveiled plans Thursday to sell manned flights to the moon by the end of the decade, in an announcement 40 years after the last human set foot there. ... more		What is Creating Gullies on Vesta? In a preliminary analysis of images from NASA's Dawn mission, scientists have spotted intriguing gullies that sculpt the walls of geologically young craters on the giant asteroid Vesta. Led by ... more		Secrets of universe revealed thanks to AF research complex Looking skyward, scientists worldwide now know the universe's size, composition, approximate age and rate of expansion, thanks in part to "essential" data derived from a time-sensitive test conducte ... more

New insights into how materials transfer heat could lead to improved electronics

Groundwater unaffected by shale gas production in Arkansas

Stacking 2-D materials produces surprising results

Artificial Forest for Solar Water-Splitting

Moth-Inspired Nanostructures Take the Color Out of Thin Films

Stanford Engineers' New Metamaterial Doubles Up on Invisibility

NIST demonstrates significant improvement in the performance of solar-powered hydrogen generation

X-ray vision can reveal the moment of birth of violent supernovae		Speeding Space Junk Poses Risks for Spacecraft		Galaxy-wide echoes from the past		Point of Light		Geminid Meteor Shower Coming on December 13-14
The Bubble Nebula, observed with the new One Degree Imager Camera		Wide Binary Stars: Long-Distance Stellar Relationships		NASA's GRAIL Creates Most Accurate Moon Gravity Map		Crowdsourcing the cosmos: Astronomers welcome all to identify star clusters in Andromeda galaxy		Can life emerge on planets around cooling stars?

Heliophysics Nugget: Sungrazing Comets as Solar Probes

Quantum thermodynamics

The dance of quantum tornadoes

A bridge to the quantum world: Dirac electrons found in unique material

'Dark Core' May Not Be So Dark After All

When the first stars blinked on

Astronomers discover and 'weigh' infant solar system

New galaxy census highlights importance of starbursts

Titan, Saturn's Largest Moon, Icier than Scientists Thought

Chinese astronauts may grow veg on Moon

NASA's Cassini Sees Abrupt Turn in Titan's Atmosphere

Search for Life Suggests Solar Systems More Habitable than Ours

Altimeter Built at Goddard Helped Identify Ice on Mercury

New radio telescope could save world billions

A Multi-Wavelength View of Radio Galaxy Hercules A

Bismuth provides perfect dance partners for quantum computing qubits

Steps towards filming atoms dancing

Do missing Jupiters mean massive comet belts?

NASA Voyager 1 Encounters New Region in Deep Space

The Beginning of Everything: A New Paradigm Shift for the Infant Universe

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