Space
We summarize the week's scientific breakthroughs every Thursday.
- Space
Half-life (more or less)
Physicists are stirred by claims that the sun may change what’s unchangeable—the rate of radioactive decay.
- Space
Hubble repair mission delayed yet again
Even as the Hubble Space Telescope was able to snap an image after several weeks of idling, a mission to visit and upgrade Hubble suffered another delay.
- Space
MESSENGER glimpses Mercury’s Western hemisphere, new features
The results are in from MESSENGER’s second flyby of Mercury, one of the least-explored planets in the solar system.
- Astronomy
Double the rubble: Nearby star system has two asteroid belts
Epsilon Eridani hosts an inner asteroid belt and planet arranged like those in the solar system.
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- Space
Try, try again
NASA announced October 23 that, despite a series of setbacks, the prognosis is good for reviving the Hubble Space Telescope.
- Space
New light on moon water
Kaguya, a Japanese spacecraft orbiting the moon, finds that a south pole crater called Shackleton has no visible signs of ice.
- Space
More problems with Hubble
Hubble’s resurrection is suspended while engineers examine two anomalies.
- Space
Hubble revives
A plan to switch the Hubble Space Telescope to a backup system works, waking up the telescope after more than two weeks of silence.
- Planetary Science
Huge cyclone churns at Saturn’s north pole
Planetary scientists have gotten their closest look yet at polar storms on the ringed planet. These polar cyclones are big enough to engulf Earth.
- Space
Hubble, heal thyself
NASA scientists are cleared to remotely switch equipment on the Hubble Space Telescope in the hopes of restoring the orbiting observatory’s function by October 16.
- Planetary Science
So close, yet so far away
Astronomers have found, in the frozen reaches beyond Neptune, two gravitationally bound objects that compose the most widely spaced binary system known in the solar system.
