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  Home arrow News arrow News from Space arrow sand trap

 
sand trap | Print |  E-mail
Written by staff   
Wednesday, 07 June 2006

>sand trap

Opportunity’s wheels are again spinning in the loose sands of Mars, according to space.com. The vehicle became stuck in a small dune while en route to Victoria Crater, and ground controllers are now analyzing the situation.

Opportunity was similarly stuck a year ago in Purgatory Dune. Controllers were able to free the rover after about five weeks.

>twofer

Near-Earth asteroid 2004 DC, which passed by Earth at a distance of 2.5 million miles on June 3, turned out to actually be two separate objects orbiting each other, according to spaceweather.com. One is 60 meters wide and the other is 300 meters wide. Scientists estimate that one in six near-Earth asteroids may be binaries like this.

>the Enceladus roll


Saturn’s icy moon Enceladus may have reoriented its vertical axis at some point in its past, according to a recent NASA release, possibly flopping over onto its side by as much as 30 degrees.

Researchers first became curious when the Cassini spacecraft detected geysers near the moon’s southern pole, an indication of heat in what should be one of the moon’s coldest regions.

Researchers now hypothesize that a large, warm, low-density blob of matter rising to the moon’s surface could have upset its rotation and caused the low-density spot to be repositioned at the moon’s pole.

>SMART-1 moon pics

The European Space Agency’s SMART-1 craft is sending back lovely pictures of the good old moon as part of its Advanced Moon Imaging Experiment (AMIE). We’ve printed one here, but to see more of these new moon details go to www.esa.int.

 
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