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December 17, 2012

China Makes First Asteroid Fly By
Beijing (XNA) Dec 17, 2012
China's space probe Chang'e-2 has successfully conducted a maneuver in which it flew by the asteroid Toutatis, about seven million km away from the Earth. Travelling in deep space, Chang'e-2 made the flyby on Dec. 13 at 16:30:09 Beijing Time (08:30"09 GMT), the State Administration of Science, Technology and Industry for National Defense (SASTIND) announced on Saturday. The flyby was the first time an unmanned spacecraft launched from Earth has taken such a close viewing of the asteroid, nam ... read more

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Rocket Burn Sets Stage for Dynamic Moon Duos' Lunar Impact The lunar twins of NASA's Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) mission have each completed a rocket burn that has sealed their fate. The burns modified the orbit of the formation-flying ... more		No plans of sending an Indian on moon India has no plans to put an astronaut on the moon, as of now. Minister of State in the Prime Minister's Office V Narayanasamy in the Rajya Sabha on Thursday said this. The minister also said ... more		Asteroid Toutatis Slowly Tumbles by Earth Scientists working with NASA's 230-foot-wide (70-meter) Deep Space Network antenna at Goldstone, Calif., have generated a series of radar data images of a three-mile-long (4.8-kilometer) asteroid th ... more
				Microquasar found in neighbor galaxy, tantalizing scientists For the first time, astronomers have found a microquasar - a black hole devouring material from a companion star - in a galaxy beyond our own Milky Way. The object, pumping out X-rays and bright bur ... more		NASA's EUNIS Mission: Six Minutes in the Life of the Sun In December, a NASA mission to study the sun will make its third launch into space for a six-minute flight to gather information about the way material roils through the sun's atmosphere, sometimes ... more

CubeSats, SmallSats and MicroSats

Study Reveals a Remarkable Symmetry in Black Hole Jets Black holes range from modest objects formed when individual stars end their lives to behemoths billions of times more massive that rule the centers of galaxies. A new study using data from NASA's S ... more		Meteor shower dazzles in night sky Clear skies and lack of moonlight created perfect viewing conditions for a meteor shower some observers in the U.S. Northeast called the best they'd ever seen. ... more		EU 'must respond' to Russia's 'hybrid warfare': von der Leyen Russia says missile strike kills three in Belgorod region: governor Trump unlikely to win Nobel Peace Prize, but who will?		ASU researchers propose new way to look at the dawn of life One of the great mysteries of life is how it began. What physical process transformed a nonliving mix of chemicals into something as complex as a living cell? For more than a century, scientis ... more
				Alcohol constrains Physical Constant in the Early Universe Radio-astronomical observations of a distant galaxy indicate that the ratio of the proton's mass to that of the electron has hardly changed over cosmic history. This fundamental constant of na ... more		12 Matter Particles Suffice in Nature How many matter particles exist in nature? Particle physicists have been dealing with this question for a long time. The 12 matter particles contained in the standard model of particle physics? Or a ... more

Solar systems for home and business

CubeSats, SmallSats and MicroSats

Tempur-Pedic Mattress Comparison & Memory Foam Mattress Review

24-armed Giant to Probe Early Lives of Galaxies A powerful new instrument called KMOS has just been successfully tested on ESO's Very Large Telescope at the Paranal Observatory in Chile. KMOS is unique as it will be able to observe not just one, ... more		NASA's Hubble Provides First Census of Galaxies Near Cosmic Dawn Using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers have uncovered a previously unseen population of seven primitive galaxies that formed more than 13 billion years ago, when the universe was less than ... more		No peace: Trump's smoldering Nobel obsession Virtual Jesus? People of faith divided as AI enters religion New species of poisonous frog discovered in Amazon; Snakebite surge as Bangladesh hit by floods		NASA Gravity Probes Prepare to Hit the Moon A pair of NASA spacecraft that have been studying the Moon's gravitational field are being prepared for a controlled descent into a mountain near the Moon's north pole. Impact is expected at about 2 ... more
				Hubble plumbs the universe, yields images of early galaxies The Hubble Space Telescope is giving scientists a look at the oldest galaxies ever seen, dating back some 13.3 billion years - providing a glimpse into how the cosmos must have looked right after the Big Bang. ... more		Student Team Provides Real-Time Video of Asteroid Toutatis 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 a ... more

Halfway Between Uranus and Neptune, New Horizons Cruises On

Dwarf planet Makemake lacks atmosphere

Keck Observations Bring Weather Of Uranus Into Sharp Focus

ASU researchers propose new way to look at the dawn of life

Mining ancient ores for clues to early life

Search for life extends to the 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?

Opportunity Checking Out Some Rocks At Matijevic Hill

Curious About Life: Interview with Darby Dyer

Curiosity Rover Nearing Yellowknife Bay

	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

Gold tops $4,000 for first time as traders pile into safe haven

Tesla shares fall on doubts that latest autos will boost sales

In Simandou mountains, Guinea prepares to cash in on iron ore

An Older Vega: New Insights About The Star All Others Are Measured By		Mining ancient ores for clues to early life		Hubble's Glitter galaxy: The ESO 318-13 galaxy		Fermi Improves its Vision for Thunderstorm Gamma-Ray Flashes		UCSB physicists make strides in understanding quantum entanglement
Unvieling diffuse x-ray emission from nearby galaxies		Do we live in a computer simulation? UW researchers say idea can be tested		NASA Astrobiology Institute Shows How Wide Binary Stars Form		Nearby star much older than thought		Apollo's Lunar Dust Data Being Restored

Point of Light

Rock Comet Meteor Shower

Search for life extends to the stars

Geminid Meteor Shower Coming on December 13-14

British astronomer Patrick Moore dead aged 89

To the moon and back for less than 2 billion dollars

The Bubble Nebula, observed with the new One Degree Imager Camera

Wide Binary Stars: Long-Distance Stellar Relationships

What is Creating Gullies on Vesta?

Secrets of universe revealed thanks to AF research complex

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

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

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