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Message from Apollo 8
On Christmas Eve in 1968, a live television broadcast from Apollo 8 offered this message of hope to the people of Earth. The famous transmission occurred as the astronauts orbited the Moon.

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ISS receives supply ship
The International Space Station receives its 20th Russian Progress cargo ship, bringing the outpost's two-man Expedition 12 crew a delivery of fresh food, clothes, equipment and special holiday gifts just in time for Christmas.

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Rendezvous with ISS
This movie features highlights of the December 23 rendezvous between the Russian Progress 20P vessel and the International Space Station. The footage comes from a camera mounted on the supply ship's nose.

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Stardust return preview
NASA's Stardust spacecraft encountered Comet Wild 2 two years ago, gathering samples of cometary dust for return to Earth. In this Dec. 21 news conference, mission officials and scientists detail the probe's homecoming and planned landing in Utah scheduled for January 15, 2006.

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Science of New Horizons
The first robotic space mission to visit the distant planet Pluto and frozen objects in the Kuiper Belt is explained by the project's managers and scientists in this NASA news conference from the agency's Washington headquarters on Dec. 19.

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New views of icy moons
NASA's Cassini spacecraft orbiting Saturn is wrapping up a phenomenally successful year of observing the mysterious icy moons, including Enceladus, Dione, Rhea, Hyperion and Iapetus.

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Children of Saturn
CASSINI PHOTO RELEASE
Posted: December 26, 2005


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

 
With the icy rings between them, Dione and Tethys each show off the prominent features for which they are known. Dione, beyond the rings, displays wispy fractures that adorn its trailing side. Tethys, on the side of the rings closest to Cassini, shows its large impact basin Odysseus.

At right, the night side of Saturn can be seen occulting the far side of the rings. The view shows the Saturn-facing side of Dione (1,126 kilometers, or 700 miles across) and the anti-Saturn side of Tethys (1,071 kilometers, or 665 miles across).

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera at a distance of approximately 3.5 million kilometers (2.2 million miles) from Dione and 2.8 million kilometers (1.8 million miles) from Tethys. The image scale is 21 kilometers (13 miles) per pixel on Dione and 17 kilometers (11 miles) per pixel on Tethys.

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.