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Vesta: Asteroid or planet?State College, Pa. (UPI) Apr 5, 2011 As a U.S. spacecraft nears a rendezvous with the asteroid Vesta, a centuries old debate has reignited - is it an asteroid or should it be considered a planet? Vesta, orbiting the sun between Mars and Jupiter in the asteroid belt, is larger than most asteroids, which average 60 miles in diameter or less, accuweather.com's astronomy blog reported Wednesday. At 330 miles in diameter, Vesta has been classified a "minor" planet, a tag it now shares with Pluto since the solar system's ninth p ... read more |
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  MESSENGER Kicks Off Yearlong Campaign Of Mercury Science This afternoon, MESSENGER began its yearlong science campaign to understand the innermost planet. The spacecraft will fly around Mercury 700 times over the next 12 months, and its instruments will p ... more | .. |
 Frozen Comet Had A Watery Past The discovery of minerals requiring liquid water for their formation challenges the paradigm of comets as "dirty snowballs" frozen in time. For the first time, scientists have found convincing evide ... more | .. |
 Dawn Keeps Rolling Along Three and a half years after launch, Dawn continues its travels around the sun, maneuvering to take the same orbital path as Vesta. Following its usual pattern, the spacecraft has spent most of the ... more | .. |
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  Sugar-Grain Sized Meteorites Rocked The Climates Of Early Earth And Mars Bombardments of 'micro-meteorites' on Earth and Mars four billion years ago may have caused the planets' climates to cool dramatically, hampering their ability to support life, according to research ... more | .. |
  Poison Could Have Set Stage For Life Formaldehyde, a poison and a common molecule throughout the universe, is likely the source of the solar system's organic carbon solids - abundant in both comets and asteroids. Scientists have long s ... more | .. |
  The Art Of Making Stars It might look like an abstract painting, but this splash of colors is in fact a busy star-forming complex called Rho Ophiuchi. NASA's Wide-field Infrared Explorer, or WISE, captured the picturesque ... more | .. |
 Searching For Alien Life? Try Failed Stars The search for alien life usually focuses on planets around other stars. But a lesser-known possibility is that life has sprung up on planets that somehow were ejected from their original solar syst ... more |
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Space Force taps five firms to develop secure global tactical satcom solutions
Russia urges caution in nuclear 'rhetoric' after Trump comments
'Unspeakable horror': the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki | .. |
 Spring Is Fireball Season What are the signs of spring? They are as familiar as a blooming Daffodil, a songbird at dawn, a surprising shaft of warmth from the afternoon sun. And, oh yes, don't forget the meteors. "Spri ... more | .. |
 Revealing The Inner Secrets Of Giant Stars University of Sydney astrophysicists are behind a major breakthrough in the study of the senior citizens of our galaxy: stars known as Red Giants. Using high precision brightness measurements taken ... more | .. |
 Forensic Sleuthing Ties Ring Ripples To Impacts Like forensic scientists examining fingerprints at a cosmic crime scene, scientists working with data from NASA's Cassini, Galileo and New Horizons missions have traced telltale ripples in the rings ... more | .. |
  Getting To Know One Of The Four Fundamental Forces Of The Universe In new work, high-energy physicists have observed two long-sought quantum states in the bottomonium family of sub-atomic particles. The result will help researchers better understand one of the four ... more |
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  Aerojet Propulsion Assists Voyager 1 Precision Maneuver At The Edge Of The Solar System Aerojet says its thrusters on the Voyager 1 spacecraft assisted in several critical repositionings of the spacecraft over 10 billion miles away from the sun, at the edge of the solar system. O ... more | .. |
 Mysterious "Ribbon" Of Energy And Particles Isolated In a paper to be published in the April, 2011, issue of The Astrophysical Journal, scientists on NASA's Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) mission, including lead author Nathan Schwadron and othe ... more | .. |
  Earth's Gravity Revealed In Unprecedented Detail After just two years in orbit, ESA's GOCE satellite has gathered enough data to map Earth's gravity with unrivalled precision. Scientists now have access to the mos ... more | .. |
 The Rose-Red Glow Of Star Formation The vivid red cloud in this new image from ESO's Very Large Telescope is a region of glowing hydrogen surrounding the star cluster NGC 371. This stellar nursery lies in our neighbouring galaxy, the ... more |
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SMOS mission reveals 15-year global forest carbon storage trends
Pacific algae invade Algeria beaches, pushing humans and fish away
Water shortages spell trouble on Turkey's tourist coast | .. |
  Texas Astronomers Find Super-Luminous Supernova Astronomers led by graduate student Emmanouil "Manos" Chatzopoulos and Dr. J. Craig Wheeler of The University of Texas at Austin have found another extremely bright, rare supernova to add to the new ... more | .. |
 Kepler Spacecraft Takes A Look Inside Red Giant Stars NASA's Kepler Mission is giving astronomers such a clear view of changes in star brightness that they can now see clues about what's happening inside red giant stars. "No one anticipated seein ... more | .. |
  White Dwarfs Could Be Fertile Ground For Other Earths Planet hunters have found hundreds of planets outside the solar system in the last decade, though it is unclear whether even one might be habitable. But it could be that the best place to look for p ... more | .. |
First Color Image Of Mercury From Orbit The first image acquired by MESSENGER from orbit around Mercury was actually part of an eight-image sequence, for which images were acquired through eight of the WAC's eleven filters. Here we ... more |
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 NASA probe aims to unlock Mercury's secrets NASA scientists pored Wednesday over stunning new images of Mercury as their MESSENGER probe began a year-long mission to map the surface of the solar system's least-understood planet. ... more | .. |
MESSENGER offers close-up of mysterious Mercury NASA celebrated Wednesday hundreds of stunning photographs from the Mercury MESSENGER probe as it began a year-long mission to orbit and map the solar system's mysterious innermost planet. ... more | .. |
 When Is An Asteroid Not An Asteroid On March 29, 1807, German astronomer Heinrich Wilhelm Olbers spotted Vesta as a pinprick of light in the sky. Two hundred and four years later, as NASA's Dawn spacecraft prepares to begin orbiting t ... more | .. |
 The Big Rock Candy Solar System The earliest rocks in our solar system were more like candy floss than the hard rock that we know today, according to research published in the journal Nature Geoscience. The earliest rocks in ... more |
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Study: Most US homes can save money and affordably weather blackouts with solar plus storage
Ultrasmall optical devices rewrite the rules of light manipulation
SFU researchers develop a new tool that brings blender-like lighting control to any photograph | .. |
 NASA Announces 2011 Carl Sagan Fellows NASA has selected five potential discoverers as the recipients of the 2011 Carl Sagan Postdoctoral Fellowships, named after the late astronomer. The Carl Sagan Fellowship takes a theme-based approac ... more | .. |
 Rare Particles Produced At The Large Hadron Collider At CERN Observed Shortly after experiments on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the CERN laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland began yielding scientific data last fall, a group of scientists led by a Syracuse Univers ... more | .. |
 Follow The GOCE Results Press Briefing Live In just two years ESA's GOCE gravity satellite has gathered enough data to map Earth's gravity with unprecedented detail. On 31 March, a press briefing focusing on the results of the mission will be ... more | .. |
 NASA releases picture of Mercury's surface NASA on Tuesday released the first picture taken of Mercury's surface by the US space agency's orbiting Messenger craft. ... more |
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 Life Stinks Says New Analysis The origin of life may have been smelly, according to a recent, NASA-funded analysis of residue from a variant of classic experiments performed by Dr. Stanley Miller in the 1950s. "One of the ... more | .. |
 New Evidence About Beginnings Of The Solar System The earliest rocks in our Solar System were more like candy floss than the hard rock that we know today, according to research published in the journal Nature Geoscience. The work, by research ... more | .. |
 Simulating Tomorrow's Accelerators At Near The Speed Of Light As conventional accelerators like CERN's Large Hadron Collider grow ever more vast and expensive, the best hope for the high-energy machines of the future may lie in "tabletop" accelerators like BEL ... more | .. |
 Exploding Stars And Stripes The discovery of a pattern of X-ray "stripes" in the remains of an exploded star may provide the first direct evidence that a cosmic event can accelerate particles to energies a hundred times higher ... more |
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