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Astrophysics

NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) satellite has released data from the first 57% of the sky surveyed during the mission. The satellite went into hibernation in early February 2011, but its discoveries include 20 comets, more than 33,000 asteroids between Mars and Jupiter, and 133 near-Earth objects. More...

The shuttle Atlantis released the Hubble Space Telescope at 08:57 EDT on 19 May 2009 after a successful servicing mission. More...

Heliophysics

Voyager 1 has encountered a region of spacecraft at the edge of our solar system that scientists believe is the last region the spacecraft will have to cross prior to entering interstellar space. More...

NASA has officially renamed the recently launched Radiation Belt Storm Probes the Van Allen Probes in honor of the late Dr. James Van Allen. More...

Lunar and Planetary Science

The OSIRIS-REx mission has passed its latest review and is moving ahead into development and testing. The mission, to be launched in 2016, will visit the asteroid Bennu in 2018 and return a sample to Earth in 2023. More information is available in the NASA Press Release.

Asteroid 2012 DA14 flew by the Earth on Friday, 15 February, coming within 27,700 km (17,200 miles, or roughly two Earth-diameters) at 19:24 UT (2:24 p.m. EST). 2012 DA14 is a near-Earth asteroid approximately 50 meters in diameter which passed from south to north over the Eastern Indian Ocean. Coincidentally, earlier the same day at 03:20 UT (10:20 EST, Feb. 14) an unrelated bolide disintegrated explosively in the atmosphere above Chelyabinsk, Russia. Early estimates give a size of 17 meters and a mass of 10 million kg.