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Sure it's pretty, and sure it boggles the mind, but maybe the most astonishing thing about the Hubble Deep Field image is that some scientists were initially against it. To quote from an article in our August/September 1996 issue:For Robert Williams, using the Hubble Space Telescope to peer deeply...
NORAD, according to this history, has been tracking Santa since 1955, when a child's call to Sears Roebuck was mistakenly directed to the Continental Air Defense Command instead.Inevitable, I suppose, that in 2009 you can follow Santa on Facebook, YouTube, Google Earth and Twitter.
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<p>The first manned rocket for the private sector.</p>
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A recent discovery from the Spitzer Space Telescope may yield new insight into the origin of our own Moon.
More than five years ago Burt Rutan made history with SpaceShipOne, the first civilian- built vehicle to reach space. That rocketplane hangs in the Milestones of Flight gallery in the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., alongside Lindbergh's Spirit of St. Louis, Yeager'...
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<p>Getting down to business.</p>
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A Swiss-built solar-powered airplane made its first short "flea hop" flight yesterday, in anticipation of initial test flights next year. The Solar Impulse HB-S1A, a project of Swiss aeronautical adventurer Bertrand Piccard, flew 1,150 feet, skimming along a military runway in Zurich just a meter a...
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<p>Helos are the way to go, here and in Afghanistan.</p>
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Back in 2005, the U.S. Congress ordered NASA to survey the skies and locate by 2020 nearly all (90 percent) of potentially Earth-threatening asteroids down to a diameter of 140 meters. Most objects larger than a kilometer have already been tracked. The idea is to extend the search and go after smal...
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<p>...but plenty hot below ground.</p>
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Russian rocket engineers do things a little differently from their American counterparts
Today's offering is a post-Thanksgiving smorgasbord of stories (okay, I'll stop with the alliteration). First, a lovely NASA video of an aurora shimmering above Saturn, with commentary by Caltech planetary scientist Andy Ingersoll, who's been exploring the outer solar system since the Pioneer 10 ...
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<p>Pilgrims, of a sort.</p>
NASA is honoring former astronaut Fred Haise on December 2 with their Ambassadors of Exploration Award, given out every few months in recent years to the first generation of explorers who made the moon landings happen.Haise is usually remembered as one of the three astronauts, along with Jim Lovell...
Bravo’s got nothing on THIS runway supermodel: Chicago’s Wright auction house, which specializes in contemporary design, will feature in its December 8 Important Design auction a cast aluminum wind tunnel model of a Douglas BTD Destroyer—along with a Mercedes 230SL convertible and a Czechoslovakian...
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<p>...winter's on the way. Weather says it's here.</p>
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The next time you book a flight online and print your own airline ticket, give a moment of thanks to IBM and American Airlines. If it weren’t for those two companies, we’d still be carving our tickets out of stone tablets.Commercial travel was so simple back in the 1920s. One airmail plane, one ava...
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Although the Moon is certainly different from the Earth, it is hardly barren.
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We've mentioned cosmonaut Maksim Surayev's blog before, but it really is worth checking out—some of the most entertaining dispatches ever written from orbit.Even his photos have personality, like this one, of his watch floating in front of the space station's window.Here's the link.
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A shame that Cessna doesn’t seem to recognize a potential PR gold mine. Remember when Mathias Rust landed a rented Cessna 172 near Red Square in 1987? Not a peep from Cessna headquarters. Now the company appears to have missed out again: In the mega-apocalyptic move 2012, a lowly Cessna 340A saves ...
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