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July 12, 2015

Last Portrait of Pluto's Puzzling Spots
Laurel MD (SPX) Jul 12, 2015
Three billion miles from Earth and just two and a half million miles from Pluto, NASA's New Horizons spacecraft has taken its best image of four dark spots that continue to captivate. The spots appear on the side of Pluto that always faces its largest moon, Charon-the face that will be invisible to New Horizons when the spacecraft makes its close flyby the morning of July 14. New Horizons principal investigator Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute, Boulder, Colorado, describes this ... read more

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NASA craft discovers heart shape on Pluto as flyby nears There's a near-perfect heart shape on Pluto's rusty red surface. The dwarf planet is dotted with bright points which may be ice caps, and a mysterious dark shape nicknamed "The Whale." ... more		Chameleon satellite to revolutionise telecom market Telecom satellites are set to enter a new age, as ESA, Eutelsat and Airbus Defence and Space begin designing the most flexible payload ever. The Quantum programme is a departure from the traditional ... more		Student Dust Counter Provides Clues About Solar System "We are stardust" is more than a lyric in a hit 1970's song. It's actually true. Our solar system began as flecks of star-created gas and dust that drew together to form our sun, the planets ... and ... more
				NASA Missions Have Their Eyes Peeled on Pluto What's icy, has "wobbly" potato-shaped moons, and is the world's best-known dwarf planet? The answer is Pluto, and NASA's New Horizons is speeding towards the edge of our solar system for a July 14 ... more		Omnidirectional free space wireless charging developed Mobile devices, such as smartphones and laptops, have become indispensable portable items in modern life, but one big challenge remains to fully enjoying these devices: keeping their batteries charg ... more

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Pluto Flyby Begins After a more than nine-year, three-billion-mile journey to Pluto, it's showtime for NASA's New Horizons spacecraft, as the flyby sequence of science observations is officially underway. In the ... more		Bricks to build an Earth found in every planetary system Earth-like planets orbiting other stars in the Milky Way are three times more likely to have the same type of minerals as Earth than astronomers had previously thought. In fact, conditions for makin ... more				New Map of Pluto This is the latest map of Pluto created from images taken from June 27 to July 3 by the Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) on New Horizons, combined with lower-resolution color data from the s ... more
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Houston, We Have Geology It began as a point of light. Then, it evolved into a fuzzy orb. Now - in its latest portrait from NASA's New Horizons spacecraft - Pluto is being revealed as an intriguing new world with distinct s ... more		Elon Musk funds major research grants on dangers of artificial intelligence Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems have never been more quick in development - or more threatening, according to SpaceX founder and CEO of Tesla Motors Elon Musk, who is sponsoring 37 multinationa ... more				Early Titan Was a Cold, Hostile Place For Life Titan is a mysterious orange-socked moon of Saturn that is exciting to astrobiologists because it has some of the same kinds of chemicals that were precursors to life on Earth. It also has a hydrolo ... more
Ball delivers optical reference units for GRACE follow-on mission Ball Aerospace and Technologies Corp. has delivered key components to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) for a laser ranging system designed to achieve greater accuracy in measuring changes in E ... more		Glitch sees NASA briefly lose touch with Pluto mission NASA briefly lost touch this weekend with an unmanned spacecraft on its way to a historic encounter with Pluto, but the US space agency said Monday the glitch has been fixed. ... more		'Pac-Man' space probe to gobble-up space debris Low Earth orbit is littered with space debris. But if the latest mission by Switzerland's EPFL Center for Space Engineering is successful, space will be less crowded by at least one satellite. ... more		Philae's comet may host alien 'life': astronomers Astronomers proposed a novel explanation Monday for the strange appearance of the comet carrying Europe's robot probe Philae through outer space: alien microscopic life. ... more

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