Science

NASA Stardust-NeXT Mission Complete

NASA’s Stardust-NExT mission completed its Valentine’s Day date with a comet with its flyby of comet Tempel 1 on Feb. 14. The spacecraft’s closest approach came at approximately 11:40 p.m. EST on Feb. 14. An imaging sequence of about eight minutes is expected to yield 72 high-resolution images around the time of closest approach for best-resolution coverage of Tempel 1’s nucleus. At the time of …

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Top 5 Awesome Things About the Webb Telescope

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is the successor to the Hubble’s throne. In order to pick up extremely faint infra-red signals from extremely distant stars and galaxies, the JWST has to be extremely cold. Any noise from the IR radiation of the Sun or Earth would make it impossible to see as far into the past as scientists want to. Thus, the JWST has …

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Astronomy: What's Up February? Moon and Planet Pairs

This month see Jupiter at sunset, Saturn at midnight, pretty moon and planet couples in-between. Plus find a comet, and an asteroid in your telescope. Also features the Valentines day flyby of comet Temple 1 by the Stardust NExT spacecraft. Brought to you by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

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Replacement Astronaut Steve Bowen Trains with STS-133 Crew

Astronaut Steve Bowen, who is replacing Tim Kopra on the crew of STS-133, trained the week of January 24 with the remaining members of space shuttle Discovery’s mission to the International Space Station. The training took place at the virtual reality lab, space shuttle simulator and neutral buoyancy laboratory at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. Kopra was replaced when a bicycle injury suffered January …

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Professional Astronomers "Unraveling the Universe"

According to Philomena Bonis, the real reason why she hosted the Astronomy & Space Exploration Society (ASX) 8th Annual Expanding Canada’s Frontier Symposium, on Friday, January 28th, at the University of Toronto Convocation Hall was to show that “the passions, the dreams and the interests of ordinary people can turn a series of seemingly small steps into something extraordinary.”

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Unraveling the Universe – 8th Annual Expanding Canada's Frontier Symposium

Tonight the Astronomy & Space Exploration Society at the University of Toronto is hosting the 8th annual “Expanding Canada’s Frontiers” symposium. It is billed as the largest astronomy symposium in the country. The event starts 7 p.m. at the University of Toronto’s Convocation Hall and doors open at 6 p.m. This years theme is “Unraveling the Universe” and features several prominent Canadian researchers.

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Planck's View of the Cosmos

Launched less than two years ago the Planck Space Telescope has released a new catalogue of data that includes thousands of never before seen dusty cocoons where stars are forming and some of the most massive clusters of galaxies ever observed. Planck’s mission is to detect light from just a few hundred thousand years after the Big Bang, an explosive event at the dawn of …

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