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NASA's dead Mars orbiter MAVEN will crash into the Red Planet in the next 100 years. It's not the only probe in the Mars morgue

The Mars graveyard just welcomed another corpse. On Wednesday (June 3), NASA officially declared its MAVEN orbiter dead, closing the book on a highly successful mission that studied the Red Planet’s atmosphere for nearly a dozen years. The MAVEN team didn’t script this ending; the orbiter went dark without warning this past December, and it remained silent despite repeated attempts to hail…
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Scientists Want the Moon to Quarantine Mars Samples

A team of researchers is advocating to use the moon as a secure site for biocontainment of extraterrestrial samples, particularly those from Mars, but also from other potential worlds like Enceladus, a moon of Saturn. The researchers contend that our moon offers a naturally sterile and isolated environment that can act as humanity’s first line of biological defense against organisms perhaps…
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Massive boom over northeastern US was a meteor explosion as powerful as 300 tons of TNT, NASA confirms

A sonic boom heard throughout the northeastern United States last week was caused by a meteor, NASA confirmed after consulting satellite imagery. The meteor’s boom, heard widely on Saturday (May 30) at 2:06 p.m. EDT (local time), was audible over the northeastern U.S. NASA made the determination that it was a meteor based on both eyewitness reports to the American Meteor Society as well as…
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Will SpaceX still be a launch company after its historic IPO?

On May 20, SpaceX filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) key documentation for an initial public offering (IPO) of stock. An IPO signals that a private company is now selling shares to the public on a stock exchange. SpaceX’s long-anticipated move…
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Astronomers discover a 'lost world' of black hole mergers: 'It's the astronomical equivalent of uncovering an ancient civilization'

Astronomers have struck “black gold” — a treasure trove of black hole mergers. And the discovery was made by analyzing ripples in the very fabric of space and time, or spacetime, called gravitational waves. This massive haul of mergers contained within the Gravitational Wave Transient Catalogue-5.0 (GWTC-5), released on Tuesday (May 26), could change our understanding of how black holes…
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