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A nearly full Rhea shines in the sunlight in this recent Cassini image. Rhea (949 miles, or 1,527 kilometers across) is Saturn’s second largest moon.
Lit terrain seen here is on the Saturn-facing hemisphere of Rhea. North on Rhea is up and rotated 43 degrees to the left. The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera on Sept. 10, 2013.
The view was obtained at a distance of approximately 990,000 miles (1.6 million kilometers) from Rhea. Image scale is 6 miles (9 kilometers) per pixel.
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.
For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission, visit http://www.nasa.gov/cassini and http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov. The Cassini imaging team homepage is at http://ciclops.org
Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute

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NASA’s Asteroid Data Hunter contest series will offer $35,000 in awards over the next six months to citizen scientists who develop improved algorithms that can be used to identify asteroids.

Military and civilian members from the 21st Space Wing, North American Aerospace Defense Command, U.S. Northern Command, Air Force Space Command, the 52nd Airlift Squadron and the 302nd Airlift Wing welcomed Secretary of the Air Force Deborah Lee James here March 5-6.

James held an all-call, where she shared her priorities and strategic future for the Air Force and spoke on how it would affect the space community and Team Pete. The visit comes on the heels of the Air Force presenting the 2015 President's Budget request, which is summarized by focusing on future challenges and opportunities while continuing to recover readiness lost during sequestration in fiscal year 2013.
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On 20 January, ESA’s Rosetta spacecraft emerged from a 31-month hibernation on the final leg of its 10-year journey to comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko. Just like the spacecraft, the mission’s target is also now emerging from hibernation.

For the last few months, the comet has been behind the Sun from our vantage point on Earth. But in late February, the Very Large Telescope of the European Southern Observatory in Chile resumed observations – its last look was on 5 October 2013.

The image presented here was taken on the night of the 27 February (09:30 GMT on 28 February). The image on the left was created by stacking individual exposures to show the background stars. These were then shifted to compensate for the motion of the comet, which appears as a small dot right on top of one of the stars (at the centre of the circle). The image on the right shows the comet when the star trails have been subtracted.

The observatory is collaborating with ESA to monitor the four kilometre-wide comet from the ground to help refine Rosetta’s navigation and to make assessments of the comet’s activity prior to the spacecraft’s arrival in August.

The comet is about 50% brighter than when it was last observed. Although it is also now nearer to Earth, it has brightened faster than expected for an inactive comet of this size, suggesting that its icy nucleus has started to evaporate as it moves gradually closer to the Sun.

The comet travels around the Sun between the orbits of Jupiter and Earth; its closest approach to the Sun, in August 2015, is at a distance of 185 million kilometres.

Rosetta will be the first mission to make continuous measurements at close-quarters of how a comet’s activity changes as it journeys around the Sun.

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Astronaut Wakata Koichi, who is in his long-duration stay on board the ISS, has succeeded Russian c

There are plenty of movies depicting boot camp where tentative faces pile out from a bus into the grasp of screaming drill sergeants, are put through strenuous physical and mental tasks, and over the timeframe of a couple months are transformed into basically trained and proficient military members. But the onboarding process it takes to get those faces onto the bus in the first place is as equally crucial for success.

The Denver Military Entrance Processing Station, or MEPS, is one of 65 total MEPS locations across the U.S. and Puerto Rico responsible for reviewing and processing the men and women who aim to be the future of the U.S. Armed Forces. Though geographically separated, Denver MEPS gains support services from Buckley Air Force Base as one of 84 Buckley base partners.
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Only one set of twins has ever been into space, and now those twins are providing an unprecedented opportunity for scientists to understand better the effects of microgravity on the human body.

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NASA has selected 108 research and technology proposals from U.S. small businesses that will enable NASA’s future missions while benefiting America’s new high technology-driven economy right here on Earth.

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After searching hundreds of millions of objects across our sky, NASA’s Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) has turned up no evidence of the hypothesized celestial body in our solar system commonly dubbed “Planet X.”

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On Aug. 3, 2004, NASA’s Mercury Surface, Space Environment, Geochemistry, and Ranging (MESSENGER) spacecraft began a seven-year journey, spiraling through the inner solar system to Mercury. One year after launch, the spacecraft zipped around Earth, getting an orbit correction from Earth’s gravity and getting a chance to test its instruments by observing its home planet.
This image is a view of South America and portions of North America and Africa from the Mercury Dual Imaging System’s wide-angle camera aboard MESSENGER. The wide-angle camera records light at eleven different wavelengths, including visible and infrared light. Combining blue, red, and green light results in a true-color image from the observations. The image substitutes infrared light for blue light in the three-band combination. The resulting image is crisper than the natural color version because our atmosphere scatters blue light. Infrared light, however, passes through the atmosphere with relatively little scattering and allows a clearer view. That wavelength substitution makes plants appear red. Why? Plants reflect near-infrared light more strongly than either red or green, and in this band combination, near-infrared is assigned to look red.
Apart from getting a clearer image, the substitution reveals more information than natural color. Healthy plants reflect more near-infrared light than stressed plants, so bright red indicates dense, growing foliage. For this reason, biologists and ecologists occasionally use infrared cameras to photograph forests.
> Read more: Why is that Forest Red and that Cloud Blue? How to Interpret a False-Color Satellite Image
Image Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington
Caption: Holli Riebeek