Ever since New Horizons first beamed back its beauty shots of Pluto in 2015, we’ve been poring over the data. Now, planetary scientists have reported evidence confirming the presence of cryovolcanoes on Pluto. The cryovolcanic region borders the southwest aspect of Sputnik Planitia, a brightly reflective, heart-shaped plateau of nitrogen …
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Robotic exploration of the red planet has taught us a great deal about our nearest planetary neighbor, and NASA’s Curiosity rover had an outsized role in accomplishing that. Its successor, a very similar rover called Perseverance, arrived on Mars last year. Perseverance sports an impressive array of instruments for studying …
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NASA has been planning for the upcoming SPHEREx mission since early 2019, and it just reached an important milestone: it’s time to start building it. NASA says all the planning work is done, and the sky-mapping telescope’s design has been confirmed down to the smallest detail. When it finally makes …
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Robotic exploration of the red planet has taught us a great deal about our nearest planetary neighbor, and NASA’s Curiosity rover had an outsized role in accomplishing that. Its successor, a very similar rover called Perseverance, arrived on Mars last year. Perseverance sports an impressive array of instruments for studying …
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We’re still several weeks away from what could be the first launch of NASA’s Artemis program, but humans won’t return to the moon quite yet. First, NASA needs a way to get astronauts to and from the lunar surface, and it’ll have two different ways to do that. It’s already …
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A few short decades ago, we could only speculate about the possibility of planets beyond our own solar system, but then we started finding them. Little by little, the universe has become a bustling place with more exoplanets being discovered every year. How many? NASA JPL says as of March …
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Meta announced on Wednesday a new set of tools designed to protect young users, an overdue response to widespread criticism that the company doesn’t do enough to protect its most vulnerable users. Parents, tech watchdogs and lawmakers alike have long called for the company to do more to keep teens …
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An inquisitive GPU modder who was experiencing insane memory temperatures has come up with a unique solution to the problem: tiny squares of copper. YouTuber DJ from DandyWorks recently published a video documenting his novel approach to heat dissipation. In the video he ditched the card’s thermal pads and replaced …
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The James Webb Space Telescope finally headed into space late last year following years of delays, but everything since then has gone as well as possible. NASA has spent the last several months deploying and calibrating the telescope, and it just hit a major milestone with the completion of “fine …
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When exoplanets come up, we’re usually adding to the total number of known worlds beyond our solar system, but not today. MIT astronomers applied the latest astronomical data to Kepler’s archive of exoplanets, finding several that no longer add up. According to the study published in the Astronomical Journal, there …
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