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Atlas 5 launches ASTRA
The Lockheed Martin Atlas 5 rocket blasts off with the European ASTRA 1KR television broadcast satellite right on time April 20 from Complex 41 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station.

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STS-51A: Daring mission
Soon after the Palapa and Westar communications satellites got stranded in worthless orbits following their deployment from shuttle Challenger in February 1984, planners began devising a rescue mission to launch that November. The STS-51A flight of shuttle Discovery is arguably one of the most daring and complex space missions ever attempted. The crew successfully launched two communications satellites and then retrieved Palapa and Westar during extraordinary spacewalks using jet-propelled backpacks and hands-on muscle power. Watch the amazing flight unfold with narration by the crew in this post-flight film.

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Memories of STS-1
In the continuing 25th anniversary celebration of STS-1, this program looks at the engineering challenges behind development of the space shuttle and performing the first flight from Mission Control. This panel includes Milt Heflin, the STS-1 ascent/entry electrical power system flight controller, former space shuttle program manager Bob Thompson, former orbiter project manager Aaron Cohen, Neil Hutchinson, the STS-1 ascent flight director, and astronauts John Young and Bob Crippen.

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STS-1 anniversary event
This 25th anniversary celebration of the first space shuttle launch took place April 12 at Space Center Houston. Speakers included Johnson Space Center Director Mike Coats, NASA Administrator Mike Griffin, Congressman Tom DeLay, Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, STS-1 commander John Young and pilot Bob Crippen.

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New lunar mission
During this NASA news conference on April 10, agency officials unveil the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite, or LCROSS, that will launch piggyback with the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft in October 2008. LCROSS will use the launch vehicle's spent upper stage to crash into the moon's south pole in an explosive search for water.

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LCROSS mission plan
Daniel Andrews, the LCROSS project manager from NASA's Ames Research Center, narrates this animation depicting the mission from launch through impact on the lunar surface.

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STS-1 crew looks back
In this highly entertaining program, commander John Young and pilot Bob Crippen of the first space shuttle crew tell stories and memories from STS-1. The two respected astronauts visited Kennedy Space Center on April 6 to mark the upcoming 25th anniversary of Columbia's maiden voyage.

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Happy sweet 16, Hubble
HUBBLE PHOTO RELEASE
Posted: April 24, 2006


Credit: NASA, ESA and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI)
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To celebrate the NASA-ESA Hubble Space Telescope's 16 years of success, the two space agencies are releasing this mosaic image of the magnificent starburst galaxy, Messier 82 (M82). It is the sharpest wide-angle view ever obtained of M82, a galaxy remarkable for its webs of shredded clouds and flame-like plumes of glowing hydrogen blasting out from its central regions.

Throughout the central region of Messier 82, young stars are being born 10 times faster than they are inside in our Milky Way Galaxy. These numerous hot new stars emit not only radiation but also particles called a stellar wind. Stellar winds streaming from these hot new stars also have combined to form a fierce galactic superwind. This superwind compresses enough gas to make millions more stars and blasts out towering plumes of hot ionised hydrogen gas, above and below the disk of the galaxy (seen in red in the image).

In M82 young stars are crammed into tiny but massive star clusters which themselves then congregate by the dozen to make the bright patches or "starburst clumps" seen in the central parts of M82. The individual clusters in the clumps can only be distinguished in the ultra-sharp Hubble images. Most of the pale objects sprinkled around the main body of M82 that look like fuzzy stars are actually star clusters about 20 light-years across and containing up to a million stars.

The rapid rate of star formation in this galaxy will eventually be self-limiting. When star formation becomes too vigorous, it will destroy the material needed to make more stars and the starburst will subside, probably in a few tens of millions of years.

Located 12 million light-years away, M82 appears high in the northern spring sky in the direction of the constellation Ursa Major, the Great Bear. It is also called the "Cigar Galaxy" because of the elongated elliptical shape produced by the tilt of its starry disk relative to our line of sight.

The observation was made in March 2006 with the Advanced Camera for Surveys' Wide Field Channel. Astronomers assembled this 6-image composite mosaic by combining exposures taken with four coloured filters that capture starlight from visible and infrared wavelengths as well as the light from the glowing hydrogen filaments.

Hubble was launched on April 24, 1990, aboard the space shuttle Discovery.

In its 16 years of viewing the sky, the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has taken roughly 750,000 exposures and probed about 24,000 celestial objects. Hubble does not travel to stars, planets and galaxies. It snaps pictures of them as it whirls around Earth. In its 16-year lifetime, the telescope has made nearly 93,500 trips around our planet, racking up almost 4 billion kilometres. That mileage is slightly more than a round trip to Saturn.

The telescope's observations have produced more than 27 terabytes of data, equal to roughly 400,000 compact discs. If those compact discs were stacked on top of each other, they would be nearly two times taller than the Eiffel Tower in Paris, France.

Each day the orbiting observatory generates about 10 gigabytes of data, enough information to fill up the hard drive of a typical home computer in a week.

In Hubble's 16-year lifetime, about 4,000 astronomers from all over the world have used the telescope to probe the universe.

Astronomers have published more than 6,300 scientific papers on Hubble results.