July 26, 2010
 NASA's Swift satellite views Comet Lulin as it made it closest approach
to Earth in February 2009. Lulin, like all comets, is a clump of frozen
gases mixed with dust. These "dirty snowballs" cast off gas and dust
whenever they venture near the sun. Comet Lulin, which is formally
known as
C/2007 N3, was discovered in 2008 by astronomers at Taiwan's Lulin
Observatory. Lulin passed closest to Earth -- 38 million miles, or
about 160 times farther than the moon -- late on the evening of Feb.
23, 2009, for North America. Image Credit: NASA, Swift, Univ.
Leicester, DSS (STScI/AURUA), Dennis Bodewits, et al.
Posted by Prateek Tripathi.
July 26, 2010
This image shows the effects of a giant black hole that has been
flipped around twice, causing its spin axis to point in a different
direction from before. The large optical image, from the Sloan Digital
Sky Survey, is centered on a radio galaxy named 4C +00.58. The smaller
image to the right shows a close-up view of this galaxy in X-rays (in
gold) from the Chandra X-ray Observatory, and radio waves (in blue)
from the Very Large Array.
At the center of 4C +00.58 is a supermassive black ho... Continue reading...
Posted by Prateek Tripathi.
July 26, 2010
 Children experience NASA from the inside during the annual "Take Your
Children to Work Day" held each summer at NASA facilities across the
country. Children get to see NASA facilities, participate in education
activities and shadow their parents during the workday.
They can also observe the agency's many different careers, learning
about occupations as varied as engineering, graphic design, accounting,
maintenance and many other professions. Pictured here, children explore
the Exploration Exp... Continue reading...
Posted by Prateek Tripathi.
July 26, 2010
 NASA and Manned Spacecraft Center (MSC) officials joined with flight
controllers to celebrate the successful conclusion of the Apollo 11
lunar landing mission in the Mission Control Center. From left
foreground Dr. Maxime A. Faget, MSC Director of Engineering and
Development; George S.
Trimble, MSC Deputy Director; Dr. Christopher C. Kraft Jr., MSC
Director fo Flight Operations; Julian Scheer (in back), Assistant
Adminstrator, Office of Public Affairs, NASA HQ.; George M. Low,
Manager, Apollo... Continue reading...
Posted by Prateek Tripathi.
July 26, 2010
 One day homeowners everywhere may be protected from deadly carbon
monoxide fumes, thanks to a device invented at NASA's Langley Research
Center. The device uses a new class of low-temperature oxidation
catalysts to convert carbon monoxide to non-toxic carbon dioxide at
room
temperature and also removes formaldehyde from the air. The catalysts
initially were developed for research involving carbon dioxide lasers.
Image Credit: NASA Continue reading...
Posted by Prateek Tripathi.
July 19, 2010
 On July 17, 1975, Cold War rivals America and the Soviet Union met in
Earth orbit as American Apollo astronauts Tom Stafford, Vance Brand and
Deke Slayton docked with Soviet Soyuz cosmonauts Aleksey Leonov and
Valeriy Kubasov. During their joint mission, the astronauts and
cosmonauts
assembled this commemorative plaque in orbit as a symbol of the
international cooperation. The American side is blue with English text,
while the Soviet side is red with Russian text. Image Credit: NASA Continue reading...
Posted by Prateek Tripathi.
July 19, 2010
 On July 11, 2010, the new moon passed directly in front of the sun,
causing a total solar eclipse in the South Pacific. In this image, the
solar eclipse is shown in gray and white from a photo provided by the
Williams College Expedition to Easter Island and was embedded with an
image of the sun’s outer corona taken by the Large Angle Spectrometric
Coronagraph (LASCO) on the SOHO spacecraft and shown in red false
color. LASCO uses a disk to blot out the bright sun and the inner
corona so tha... Continue reading...
Posted by Prateek Tripathi.
July 19, 2010
 On its way to a 2014 rendezvous with comet
67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, the European Space Agency's Rosetta
spacecraft, with NASA instruments aboard, flew past asteroid Lutetia on
Saturday, July 10. The instruments aboard Rosetta recorded the first
close-up image of the biggest asteroid so far
visited by a spacecraft. Rosetta made measurements to derive the mass
of the object, understand the properties of the asteroid's surface
crust, record the solar wind in the vicinity and look for evidence ... Continue reading...
Posted by Prateek Tripathi.
July 19, 2010
 NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory has viewed a powerful microquasar on
the outskirts of NGC 7793, a nearby galaxy that is 12.7 million light
years away Continue reading...
Posted by Prateek Tripathi.
July 19, 2010
 A piece of NASA history landed at the Glenn Research Center's Visitor
Center, now located at the Great Lakes Science Center in Cleveland,
Ohio. The Apollo Command Module, used for the Skylab 3 mission in 1973,
was moved successfully from Glenn to the Science Center on Tuesday,
June 22. The module will be the focal point of the Visitor Center,
which includes space and aeronautics artifacts, models and interactive
experiences. The move was carefully planned to protect and preserve the
module, w... Continue reading...
Posted by Prateek Tripathi.
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