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  The horror of space...news!Oct 31, 2012 11:19 PM PDT | url
 
Added 1 new A* page:How about a spooOoky space news roundup for Halloween? WoooOooo:
 
- The largest dark area on the Moon, the "Ocean of Storms," may be the scar from a massive asteroid impact maybe as much as 4 billion years ago that left a magma sea a thousand miles wide and hundreds of miles deep.
 
- That privately-owned SpaceX "Dragon" capsule that was the first private ship to take cargo to the ISS returned safely with some return cargo: "nearly 2,000 pounds of science experiments and old station equipment" and "nearly 500 frozen samples of blood and urine collected by station astronauts over the past year." With the Space Shuttles shut down, the Dragon capsules are the only vessels capable of delivering to and returning cargo from the space station.
 
- Over on Mars, the Curiosity rover analyzed its first scoop of Martian soil, using a technique called X-ray diffraction: "While X-ray diffraction has been around for a century, using the technology on Mars required years of work to scale down refrigerator-sized equipment into something that would fit into the space of a shoe box." So far, scientists have found that the sample it scanned "bears a striking resemblance to weathered, volcanic sand in Hawaii." Mars beach party!
 
- Based on readings taken over the past year+ by the Dawn spacecraft, scientists have concluded that the giant asteroid Vesta gets its dark coloration from carbon left on it by asteroid impacts. "It forces one to [suppose] most objects are contaminated this way, and this is the way the Earth got its water and organic material. It not only has implications for the surface of Vesta, but for most other airless inter-solar system objects."
 
 
 
 
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