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NASA's moon-orbiting robot crashes

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NASA's robotic moon explorer, LADEE, is no more.

Flight controllers confirmed early on Friday that the moon-orbiting spacecraft crashed into the back side of the moon as planned.

Researchers believe LADEE likely vaporised upon contact because of its extreme orbiting speed of 3600 mph (5800 kph), possibly smacking into a mountain or side of a crater. No debris would have been left behind.

'It's bound to make a dent,' project scientist Rick Elphic predicted on Thursday.

By Thursday evening, the spacecraft had been skimming the lunar surface at an incredibly low altitude of 300 feet (100m). Its orbit had been lowered on purpose last week to ensure a crash by Monday following an extraordinarily successful science mission.

LADEE - short for Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer - was launched in September from Virginia. It completed its primary 100-day science mission last month and was on overtime.

The extension had LADEE flying during this week's lunar eclipse; its instruments were not designed to endure such prolonged darkness and cold. But the small spacecraft survived - it's about the size of a vending machine - with just a couple pressure sensors acting up.

LADEE did not have enough fuel to remain in lunar orbit beyond mission's end and keep collecting science. So from the outset, NASA planned to crash the spacecraft into the back side of the moon, far from the Apollo artefacts left behind during the moonwalking days of 1969 to 1972.

During its mission, LADEE identified various components of the thin lunar atmosphere - neon, magnesium and titanium, among others - and studied the dusty veil surrounding the moon, created by all the surface particles kicked up by impacting micrometeorites.

'LADEE's science cup really overfloweth,' Elphic said earlier this month.

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NASA's moon-orbiting robot crashes

Latest NASA Mars Image Reveals Building Foundation Amazing Mars Anomaly – Video

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Latest NASA Mars Image Reveals Building Foundation Amazing Mars Anomaly
Latest NASA Mars Image Reveals Building Foundation Amazing Mars Anomaly Visit us at http://enigmadigest.blogspot.com This a close look at one of the latest Mars rover images released...

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Latest NASA Mars Image Reveals Building Foundation Amazing Mars Anomaly - Video

NASA's Curiosity rover sends pictures of space rocks from Martian surface

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NASA'sCuriosity rover snapped pictures ofCeres and Vesta, the two biggest space rocks in the solar system's asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.

NASA's Mars rover Curiosity has captured the first image of asteroids as seen from the surface of the Red Planet.

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Curiosity's historic asteroid pictureof the Martian sky shows Ceres and Vesta, the two biggest space rocks in the solar system's asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. These objects would be bright enough to be visible to a person with normal eyesight standing on the Red Planet, NASA officials wrote in an image description.

The SUV-sized Curiosity rover has an imaging system on its "head" called Mastcam, which snapped the picture on April 20, PDT (April 21, UTC). The rover was primarily taking portraits of Mars' two moons, PhobosandDeimos, but the asteroids appeared in a 12-second exposure as faint streaks. Curiosity also saw the planets Jupiter and Saturn during its photo session. [Photos: Asteroid Vesta Seen by NASA Spacecraft]

"This imaging was part of an experiment checking the opacity of the atmosphere at night in Curiosity's location on Mars, where water-ice clouds and hazes develop during this season," camera team member Mark Lemmon, of Texas A&M University, said in a statement. "The two Martian moons were the main targets that night, but we chose a time when one of the moons was near Ceres and Vesta in the sky."

Witha diameter of about 590 miles (950 kilometers),Ceresis by far the largest object in the asteroid belt. The spherically shaped body was the first asteroid to be discovered (by Giuseppe Piazziin 1801) and it is actually considered a dwarf planet now.

Vesta, meanwhile, measures 350 miles (563 kilometers) wide and ranks as the third largest object in the asteroid belt, though it is the second-most massive. It has dark and light patches much like Earth's moon, and chunks of the asteroid have broken off and slammed into Earth as meteorites. From an Earthling's point of view, Vesta is the brightest asteroid in the sky, sometimes visible to the naked eye.

NASA's Dawn mission orbited Vesta in 2011 and 2012, capturing detailed images of the asteroid's lumpy, pockmarked surface. The spacecraft will enter into orbit around Ceres next year.

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NASA's Curiosity rover sends pictures of space rocks from Martian surface

NASA of the 1970s reveals how it thought the future would look

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NASA has revealed what it thought the future might look like back in the 1970s and it's pretty impressive.

Three concepts for space colonies were drawn up showing elaborate communities to house anything from 10,000 people all the way up to a full 1 million people, with everything from rivers to trees to fully enclosed agriculture pods.

NAS thought that rather than living on planets, settlers would live on gigantic spaceships in three different designs: cylindrical colonies, toroidal -- or donut shaped -- colonies and Bernal spheres in which the people would live inside a giant hollow sphere.

The settlements would be airtight to hold a breathable atmosphere and would rotate in order to provide psuedo-gravity so the people could stand on the inside of the hull of any given ship.

The renderings were drawn up by researchers at NASA's Ames Research Center and Stanford University during three space colony summer studies done in the 1970s, when space exploration was arguably reaching towards its heyday. Thave been kept under wraps until now.

The cylindrical design is perhaps the most impressive, with the potential to house over 1 million people with full-grown living landscapes mixed with human engineering like a suspension bridge.

The agriculture models in the Bernal sphere design show cattle being raised in fields on one level while above, on a second tier, regular farm machinery harvests crops.

Many benefits of living in a colony are noted including access to "continuous, ample, reliable solar energy" and "great views from Earth."

Enormous amounts of matter, probably lunar soil at first, according to the researchers, must cover the settlements to protect inhabitants from radiation just as the Earth's atmosphere is designed to protect us regular Earthlings.

NASA's settlements website shows just how optimistic these visionaries were about how far space travel could develop, suggesting the idea of launching millions of people to live in space was not totally outlandish.

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NASA of the 1970s reveals how it thought the future would look

NASA MARS CURIOSITY ROVER SOL 604 – SIGNS OF LIFE ON MARS PAST OR PRESENT ? – Video

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NASA MARS CURIOSITY ROVER SOL 604 - SIGNS OF LIFE ON MARS PAST OR PRESENT ?
http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl-raw-images/msss/00604/mcam/0604MR0025500040400900E01_DXXX.jpg TRUTHSEEKER #39;S RESEARCH INTO MARS ANOMALIES ,I WILL TAKE YOU UNDER NASA #39;S BLUR AND SHOW YOU THE REAL...

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NASA MARS CURIOSITY ROVER SOL 604 - SIGNS OF LIFE ON MARS PAST OR PRESENT ? - Video


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