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Pluto New Horizons
Check out NASA's Pluto-bound New Horizons spacecraft undergoing thermal blanket installation inside the cleanroom at Kennedy Space Center's Payload Hazardous Servicing Facility in preparation for launch in January from the Cape.

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Mountains of creation
A new image from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope reveals billowing mountains of dust ablaze with the fires of stellar youth. The majestic infrared view from Spitzer resembles the iconic "Pillars of Creation" picture taken of the Eagle Nebula in visible light by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope.

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Space history: STS-51A
This week marks the anniversary of arguably the most daring and complex space shuttle mission. The astronauts successfully launched two satellites and then recovered two others during extraordinary spacewalks by astronauts using jet-propelled backpacks and pure muscle power.

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Space station EVA
Commander Bill McArthur and flight engineer Valery Tokarev conduct a 5 1/2-hour spacewalk outside the International Space Station, installing a TV camera, doing repair chores and jettisoning a failed science probe.

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Griffin testifies
NASA Administrator Mike Griffin goes before the U.S. House of Representative's Science Committee to provide an update on the moon-Mars exploration program, the future of the space shuttle and space station, possible servicing of Hubble, cost overruns on the James Webb Space Telescope and the agency's aeronautics research.

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The Earth from space
Return to flight space shuttle commander Eileen Collins narrates an interesting slide show featuring some favorite photographs of Earth taken during her previous shuttle missions.

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Sleek rings, rugged moon
CASSINI PHOTO RELEASE
Posted: November 21, 2005


Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute
Download larger image version here

 
Rhea floats below the innermost regions of Saturn's amazing rings. This view of the Saturn-facing hemisphere of Rhea (1,528 kilometers, or 949 miles across) allows a glimpse of the wispy terrain that covers the trailing hemisphere of Rhea.

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini narrow-angle camera at a distance of approximately 1.9 million kilometers (1.2 million miles) from Rhea and at a Sun-Rhea-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 51 degrees. The image scale is 12 kilometers (7 miles) per pixel.

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and assembled at JPL. The imaging operations center is based at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colo.