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The year in space In 2012, scientists captured stunning images of Hurricane Sandy, the transit of Venus, the Martian surface and more.
Dec. 20, 2012
A photograph taken by astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope shows a festive-looking nearby planetary nebula called NGC 5189.
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NASA via Reuters
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Dec. 19, 2012
A composite shows images from the Chandra X-ray Observatory (purple) and the Hubble Telescope (yellow). The black hole at the center of this galaxy is part of a survey of 18 of the biggest known black holes in the universe. Researchers found that the black holes in the survey may be about ten times more massive than previously thought.
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NASA via Reuters
Dec. 17, 2012
An artist's depiction shows the twin spacecraft, Ebb and Flow, that make up NASA's Gravity Recovery And Interior Laboratory mission.
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NASA via European Pressphoto Agency
January 17, 2012
An artist's rendering shows twin GRAIL spacecraft in orbit around the moon.
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NASA via Reuters
December 7, 2012
An image shows variations in the lunar gravity field on the moon as measured by NASA's Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory during the primary mapping mission, from March to May. Very precise microwave measurements between the Ebb and Flow spacecraft were used to map gravity with high precision and high spatial resolution.
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AFP/Getty Images
Oct. 28, 2012
This satellite picture released by the NASA GOES Project shows this image from NOAA's GOES-13 satellite of the massive Hurricane Sandy. The line of clouds from the Gulf of Mexico north are associated with the cold front that Sandy is merging with. Sandy's western cloud edge is over the Mid-Atlantic and northeastern United States.
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NASA via AFP/Getty Images
Nov. 27, 2012
Roiling storm clouds and a vortex swirl around the center of Saturn's famed north polar hexagon in this image from NASA's Cassini mission. The camera was pointing toward Saturn from approximately 224,618 miles away.
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NASA via Reuters
Jan. 5, 2012
Saturn's largest moon, Titan, looks dwarfed beside the gas giant in this Cassini spacecraft view. Titan is in the upper right. Saturn's rings appear across the top of the image, and they cast a series of shadows onto the planet. The moon Prometheus, 53 miles across, appears as a tiny white speck above the rings in the far upper right of the image. The shadow cast by Prometheus can be seen as a small black speck on the planet on the far left of the image, between the shadows cast by the main rings and the thin F ring. The image was taken with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera using a spectral filter sensitive to wavelengths of near-infrared light and from a distance of approximately 426,000 miles from Saturn.
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NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute
June 6, 2012
NASA's Cassini spacecraft looks toward the night side of Saturn's largest moon and sees sunlight scattering through the periphery of Titan's atmosphere and forming a ring of color. Titan's north polar hood can be seen at the top of this view, and a hint of the south polar vortex can be detected at the bottom. This view looks toward the Saturn-facing side of Titan. North on Titan is up and rotated 9 degrees to the right. Images taken using red, green and blue spectral filters were combined to create this natural-color view. The images were acquired with the Cassini spacecraft wide-angle camera at a distance of approximately 134,000 miles.
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NASA/JPL-Caltech/SSI
This undated image released by NASA’s Cassini mission shows the surface of Saturn's geyser moon, Enceladus. Cassini imaging scientists used views such as this to help them identify the source locations for jets spurting ice particles, water vapor and trace organic compounds from the surface of Enceladus.
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NASA via Reuters
Feb. 22, 2012
Barchan sand dunes are seen in the north polar region of Mars. Visible during the northern spring season, the dunes and ground are still covered in seasonal frost. The speckled appearance is due to the warming of the area: As the carbon dioxide frost and ice on the dunes warms, small areas turn from solid to gas faster, creating small jets that expose and deposit dark sand and dust onto the surface.
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AFP/Getty Images
March 7, 2012
A towering dust devil casts a serpentine shadow over the Martian surface. The image was acquired by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.
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NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona via AFP/Getty Images
In this image provided by NASA on Oct. 31, the space agency’s Curiosity rover used its Mars Hand Lens Imager to capture the set of thumbnail images that created this full-color self-portrait.
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NASA/JPL-Caltech/Malin Space Science Systems via Reuters
Oct. 11, 2012
This image from the Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI) camera on NASA's Mars rover Curiosity shows a small bright object on the ground beside the rover at the Rocknest site. The object is just below the center of this image. It is about half an inch (1.3 centimeters) long. The rover team has assessed this object as debris from the spacecraft, possibly from the events of landing on Mars. The image was taken during the mission's 65th Martian day, or sol.
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NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS via AFP/Getty Images
Aug. 23, 2012
A chapter of the layered geological history of Mars is laid bare in this color image of the base of Mount Sharp, the Curiosity rover’s eventual science destination. The image is a portion of a larger image taken by Curiosity’s 100-millimeter Mast Camera. Scientists enhanced the color in one version to show the Martian scene under the lighting conditions we have on Earth, which helps in analyzing the terrain. The pointy mound in the center of the image is about 1,000 feet across and 300 feet high.
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NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS via AP
Sept. 13, 2012
The Curiosity rover observes the moon Phobos grazing the sun's disk on Martian day, or sol, 37. The rover, dispatched to determine whether the planet most like Earth in the solar system could have supported microbial life, has taken on a second job: moonlighting as an astronomer. Curiosity outfitted its high-resolution camera with protective filters and took pictures of the sun as Phobos, one of Mars's two small moons, sailed by. It was a tricky shoot. Phobos and its sister moon, Deimos, are closer to Mars than our moon is to Earth, so they shoot across the sky relatively quickly. Phobos takes less than eight hours to circle Mars. Deimos takes about 30 hours to make the trip.
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NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS via Reuters
The Voyager 1 spacecraft captured this volcanic plume on Jupiter moon’s Io. Launched in 1977, the twin spacecraft are exploring the edge of the solar system. Voyager 1 is poised to cross into interstellar space.
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NASA via AP
June 5, 2012
In this composite image by NASA, the agency’s Solar Dynamics Observatory satellite captures the path sequence of the transit of Venus across the sun. The last transit was in 2004, and the next pair of events will not happen again until 2117 and 2125.
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NASA via Getty Images
June 5, 2012
This Hinode image shows Venus crossing in front of the sun — the last transit until 2117. Hinode is a joint JAXA/NASA mission to study the connections of the sun's surface magnetism, primarily in and around sunspots. NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., manages Hinode. The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Mass., is the lead U.S. investigator for the X-ray Telescope.
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JAXA/NASA via AP
This photo, made available Nov. 27, shows a 68-mile-diameter crater, large indentation at center, in the north polar region of Mercury, which has been shown to harbor water ice. Measurements were made by the Messenger spacecraft.
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NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Carnegie Institution of Washington via AP
The central peaks of a complex crater on Mercury are captured in this recent photo from NASA’s Messenger spacecraft, which is orbiting the solar system’s innermost planet.
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NASA via Reuters
The south pole of the giant asteroid Vesta is seen in this photograph taken by the NASA Dawn spacecraft. After a year examining Vesta, Dawn was poised to head to the asteroid Ceres, where it will arrive in 2015.
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NASA via AP
Feb. 22, 2006
This file image from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope shows Pluto and three of its moons. A team of scientists using the telescope said on July 11 that they have discovered the tiniest moon yet around Pluto. That brings the number of known moons to five.
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NASA via AP
In this image taken by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, a "dust factory" 30 million light-years away can be seen in the spiral galaxy M74. The factory is at the scene of a massive star's explosive death, or supernova.
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NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Telescope Science Institute
Oct. 4, 2012
A dying star is throwing a cosmic tantrum in this combined image from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope and the Galaxy Evolution Explorer. In death, the star's dusty outer layers are unraveling into space, glowing from the intense ultraviolet radiation being pumped out by the hot stellar core. This object, called the Helix Nebula, is 650 light-years away in the constellation of Aquarius.
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NASA via Reuters
In this image provided by the European Southern Observatory on Nov. 6, the planetary nebula Fleming 1 is seen in the constellation of Centaurus. The nebula is a glowing cloud of gas around a dying star, and new observations have shown it is likely that two rare white dwarf stars lie at its heart.
H. Boffin
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European Southern Observatory via AFP/Getty Images
Sept. 6, 2012
NASA's Hubble Space Telescope image shows two very different galaxies drifting through space in this image released on Sept. 6. The peculiar galaxy pair is called Arp 116, which is composed of a giant elliptical galaxy known as Messier 60 or M60, center, and a much smaller spiral galaxy, NGC 4647, upper right. M60 is the third-brightest galaxy in the Virgo cluster, a collection of more than 1,300 galaxies. M60 has a diameter of 120,000 light-years and a mass of about 1 trillion times that of the sun. A huge black hole of 4.5 billion solar masses lies at its center, one of the most massive black holes ever found. The faint bluish spiral galaxy NGC 4647 is about two-thirds of M60 in size and much lower in mass — roughly the size of our galaxy, the Milky Way. M60 lies roughly 54 million light-years away from Earth; NGC 4647 is about 63 million light-years away.
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NASA, ESA and the Hubble Heritage (STScI/AURA)-ESA/Hubble Collaboration via Reuters
Feb. 13, 2012
A sinuous filament of cosmic dust more than 10 light-years long is captured in this image. In it, newborn stars are hidden and dense clouds of gas are on the verge of collapsing to form yet more stars.The Taurus Molecular Cloud, in the constellation of Taurus (the Bull), lies about 450 light-years from Earth. It is one of the regions of star formation closest to Earth.
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European Southern Observatory via AFP/Getty Images
In this image provided by the European Southern Observatory on Oct. 31, globular cluster NGC 6362 is captured by the wide-field imager camera on a telescope at the observatory in La Silla, Chile. The inset image shows the heart of the cluster, which was obtained by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. Globular clusters are composed mainly of tens of thousands of very old stars.
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European Southern Observatory via European Pressphoto Agency
The oddly shaped Pencil Nebula (NGC 2736) is pictured in this image from European Southern Observatory’s La Silla Observatory in Chile, which was released Sept. 24. This nebula is a small part of a huge remnant left over after a supernova explosion that took place about 11,000 years ago.
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European Southern Observatory/NASA via Reuters
Sept. 26, 2012
This NASA image combines observations taken by the Hubble space telescope over the past decade of a small patch of sky in the constellation of Fornax. With more than 500 hours of exposure time, it is the deepest image of the universe ever made. The image covers an area less than a tenth of the width of the full moon, making it just a 30 millionth of the whole sky. Yet even in this tiny fraction of the sky, the long exposure reveals about 5,500 galaxies, some of them so distant that we see their light that was created when the universe was less than 5 percent of its current age.
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AFP/Getty Images
This image, released Oct. 15, depicts a massive galaxy cluster, MACS J0717.5+3745, as seen from the Hubble Space Telescope. The large field of view is a combination of 18 images. Studying the distorting effects of gravity on light from background galaxies, a team of astronomers has uncovered the presence of a filament of dark matter extending from the core of the cluster. The dark matter is revealed on a map of the mass in the cluster and surrounding region, shown here in blue. The filament visibly extends out and to the left of the cluster core. Using additional observations from ground-based telescopes, the team mapped the filament’s structure in three dimensions — the first time this has been done. The filament was discovered to extend back from the cluster core, meaning we are looking along it.
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European Space Agency/NASA via AFP/Getty Images
This image released by NASA on Oct. 31 shows nebula VdB 152, which is nearly 1,400 light-years away. Pockets of interstellar dust in the region block light from background stars or scatter light from the embedded bright star, giving parts of the nebula its characteristic blue color. Ultraviolet light from the star is thought to cause the reddish luminescence in the nebular dust.
Stephen Leshin
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NASA via AFP/Getty Images
Nov. 12, 2012
The Milky Way and other galaxies harbor young clusters and associations that each contain hundreds to thousands of hot, massive stars — known as B- and O-type stars. The cluster Cygnus OB2 contains more than 60 O-type stars and about a thousand B-type stars. In this image, X-ray emissions (shown in blue) captured by NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory have been combined with infrared data (shown in red) from its Spitzer Space Telescope and optical data (shown in orange) from its Isaac Newton Telescope.
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NASA via AFP/Getty Images
This undated image from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope shows the spiral galaxy NGC 2841, which is about 46 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Ursa Major. The galaxy is helping astronomers solve one of the oldest puzzles in astronomy: Why do galaxies look so smooth, with stars sprinkled evenly throughout? An international team of astronomers has discovered that rivers of young stars flow from their hot, dense stellar nurseries, dispersing to form large, smooth distributions.
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NASA/JPL-Caltech
Sept. 3, 2012
The aurora borealis, or Northern lights, is seen over Whitehorse, Yukon Territory.
David Cartier Sr.
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NASA via Reuters
Aug. 31, 2012
A filament of solar material that had been hovering in the sun’s atmosphere erupts into space. The coronal mass ejection traveled at more than 900 miles per second.
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NASA/GSFC/SDO via Reuters
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