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Photos: Ariane 5 counting down to liftoff
Launch crews rolled out a nearly 180-foot-tall Ariane 5 rocket to its launch pad Monday in a final major step before liftoff with the Arabsat 6B and GSAT 15 communications satellites to broadcast television, broadband and other telecom services across Africa, the Middle East, Central Asia and India.
Spacewalkers reconfigure station cooling system
Space station commander Scott Kelly and Kjell Lindgren carried out a busy but mostly trouble-free spacewalk Friday, routing ammonia coolant back to the prime radiator used by one of the lab’s solar arrays and bypassing a secondary radiator that was activated three years ago to help pinpoint a coolant leak.
Solar wind blasting away Martian atmosphere
The solar wind, the million-mile-per-hour stream of charged particles blasted away from the sun, is slowly but surely stripping away Mars’ atmosphere and likely played a major role in turning the red planet from a habitable world in the distant past into the dry, frozen wasteland seen today, scientists said Thursday.