NASA officials announced Wednesday, May 15, that the Kepler space telescope – the agency's primary instrument for detecting planets beyond our solar system – had suffered a critical failure and could soon be shut down permanently.
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Much like the inside of an operating room, in the clean room at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., engineers worked meticulously to implant part of the eyes of the James Webb Space Telescope. They scrubbed up and suited up to perform one of the most delicate performances of their lives. That part of the eyes, the MIRI, or Mid-Infrared Instrument, will glimpse the formation of galaxies and see deeper into the universe than ever before.
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Constance Gartner first heard about NASA’s SOFIA (Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy) from her students at the Wisconsin School for the Deaf in Delavan, Wis.
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After making over 35 000 observations and logging more than 25 000 hours of studying the Universe, the Herschel Space Observatory has exhausted its supply of liquid helium, which is required to cool the telescope's instruments to make highly precise measurements.
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Staring at a small patch of sky for more than 50 hours with the ultra-sensitive Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA), astronomers have for the first time identified discrete sources that account for nearly all the radio waves coming from distant galaxies. They found that about 63 percent of the background radio emission comes from galaxies with gorging black holes at their cores and the remaining 37 percent comes from galaxies that are rapidly forming stars.
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A University of Washington astronomer is using Earth's interstellar neighbors to learn the nature of certain stars too far away to be directly measured or observed, and the planets they may host.
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A NASA-led team of astronomers has discovered five new planets, two of which are a habitable distance from their star.
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Spanish industry is leading the Proba-3 mission, a world first in precise formation flying. This European Space Agency (ESA) project aims to demonstrate that two satellites can move as one single object with sub-millimetre precision. This configuration will enable the creation of enormous space telescopes with the lens and detector hundreds of metres apart.
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Friday marked another important step forward for the future of astronomical discovery and economic opportunity on Hawaii Island. The Hawaiian Board of Land and Natural Resources (BLNR) announced that it has granted a permit to the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) project to build and operate the next-generation observatory near the summit of Mauna Kea.
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The public is invited to experience "Stars and Planets Everywhere! Finding Other Worlds Beyond Our Solar System," a free event on April 10 at the Visitor Center at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. The lecture will be presented by Jennifer Wiseman , senior astrophysicist at NASA Goddard.
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