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NASA has blended three views of our home galaxy’s turbulent core to produce a picture filled with scientifically significant snap, crackle and pop. And the deeper you go into the image, the more you learn.

The composite picture of the Milky Way’s center draws upon near-infrared data from the Hubble Space Telescope (shown in yellow), infrared readings from the Spitzer Space Telescope (shown in rich red) and the X-ray vision of the Chandra X-ray Observatory (shown in shades of blue and violet)

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CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. – A prototype version of NASA’s newest rocket is ready for its planned Tuesday launch, mission managers said Friday.

NASA is set to test the design of its next-generation rocket, Ares I, during a demonstration liftoff called Ares I-X. The launch, slated for 8 a.m. ET on Oct. 27 from Launch Pad 39B at Kennedy Space Center here, will be a suborbital flight of the new rocket’s first stage, with a dummy second stage and mock crew capsule on top.

NASA officially gave the go-ahead for Tuesday’s launch after a Flight Test Readiness Review meeting among mission managers.
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“The team is ready to go fly,” said Bob Ess, Ares I-X mission manager, at a briefing following the meeting. “The vehicle is actually ready to go fly.”

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NASA scientists have finally seen in their data a debris plume created by the impact of a moon probe last week.

The faint plume was seen in the data from the engineered crash one week after the impact of the LCROSS probe.

Scientists are hoping that analysis of the plume will show signs of water ice ejected from the probe’s target crater, named Cabeus, at the lunar south pole.
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The debris plume, created by the probe’s Centaur stage rocket, was captured by the LCROSS ultraviolet/visible and near infra-red spectrometer. Its signature was faint, but distinct.

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“We saw nothing,” he said.

Samuels is vice president of the Fremont Peak Observatory near Monterey, California, which had invited members of the public to watch Friday’s NASA mission through its telescopes.

The lunar strike happened shortly after 4:30 a.m. on the West Coast (7:30 a.m. ET).

NASA had encouraged everyone around the country to host “impact parties,” saying the plume of dust generated by the lunar impact would be visible through “mid-sized backyard” telescopes 10 inches or larger. It said the chances of seeing the plume were greater for people living in areas that were still dark.

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The ring’s orbit is tilted 27 degrees from the planet’s main ring plane. The bulk of it starts about 3.7 million miles (6 million km) away from the planet and extends outward another 7.4 million miles (12 million km).

Its diameter is equivalent to 300 Saturns lined up side to side. And its entire volume can hold one billion Earths, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory said late Tuesday.

“This is one supersized ring,” said Anne Verbiscer, an astronomer at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville.

Verbiscer and two others are authors of a paper about the discovery published Wednesday in the journal Nature.

The obvious question: Why did it take scientists so long to discover something so massive?

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LOS ANGELES – Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin is taking a trip to the Emmys.

The Academy of Television Arts & Sciences said Tuesday that Aldrin, part of the 1969 moon mission, will accept the Philo T. Farnsworth Award on NASA’s behalf at the Emmy engineering awards on Saturday.

The award, named for the inventor of television, recognizes an agency, company or institution whose contributions affected the state of TV technology and engineering.

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CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. – When the Soviet Union was beating America’s pants off heaving cosmonauts into orbit, a young president named John Fitzgerald Kennedy called a handful of top space experts in and decided Americans would walk on the moon.

Kennedy wanted to win the space race with the Russians — but more importantly, it was his dream to send astronauts to the moon. They needed to go because Earth is finite, a cradle for humans, and if humans are to survive they need homes out there.

America won that space race, and eventually the Cold War as well. Now another young president is facing a choice in space, and his decision could be as momentous as the one Kennedy made more than four decades ago.

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HOUSTON – As NASA prepares for its final service call to the Hubble Space Telescope, it’s also preparing for something never attempted in the history of the shuttle program: a rescue operation so dramatic that Hollywood would be hard-pressed to come up with a more outlandish plot.

If the Hubble repair crew due for liftoff on Monday got into the deepest sort of orbital trouble, yet another shuttle would have to be launched into orbit as little as a week later. NASA hasn’t launched two piloted spacecraft so close together in more than 40 years. But that’s just the first act of the drama.