Tag: University of Washington
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Cygnus cargo ship heads to space station with satellite built by students in Seattle
Northrop Grumman’s Antares rocket rises from its Virginia launch pad, sending a Cygnus cargo craft to the International Space Station. (NASA Photo / Bill Ingalls) Northrop Grumman launched a robotic Cygnus cargo capsule to the International Space Station today, marking one giant leap for a small satellite built by students at the University of Washington…
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Happy Halloween from Hubble Telescope: Otherworldly ‘eyes’ glow in ghostly galaxy
This Hubble image of the merged galaxy known as AM 2026-424 was taken on June 19 in visible light by the Advanced Camera for Surveys. The system resides 704 million light-years from Earth. (NASA / ESA / UW / Dalcanton, Williams and Durbin) Now here’s something really scary for Halloween: Imagine two galaxies slamming into…
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Kids re-enact moon landing in robot challenge at Univ. of Washington — and win trips to NASA sites
Students with the W.O.W. (Women of the World) team from Forks, Wash., test their rover in the practice space at the University of Washignton. (University of Washington Photo) Middle and high school students from across Washington state competed in a robotics challenge last week at the University of Washington to mark the 50th anniversary of…
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Rocketeers from University of Washington take the prize at Spaceport America Cup
Teammates from the University of Washington’s Society for Advanced Rocket Propulsion carry hardware during the Spaceport America Cup competition in New Mexico. (UW-SARP via Facebook) If at first you don’t succeed … try, try, try again. That’s the formula that the University of Washington’s Society for Advanced Rocket Propulsion followed to win the top prize…
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Astrobiology takes the spotlight: Saturn’s moon Enceladus may offer a ‘free lunch’
This composite image shows how plumes of water emanate from fissures in the surface ice of Enceladus, one of Saturn’s moons. (NASA / JPL Illustration) The sea that lies beneath the icy surface of Enceladus, one of Saturn’s moons, could provide even more fuel for extraterrestrial organisms than previously thought. That’s the upshot of a…
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UW researchers and Florida middle school students form unusual bond over cosmic kidney stones
A collaboration between this Florida middle school robotics team and the University of Washington is potentially “life changing,” according to a science teacher at the school. (Pahokee Middle School Photo) Eight students from a low-income sugarcane town in South Florida spent months on a robotics project tackling kidney stones in space. Across the country, researchers…
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Rapid-response telescope team shares greatest hits from ZTF sky scanner
This composite image of the Andromeda galaxy was made by combining images from the Zwicky Transient Facility in three bands of visible light. The image covers 2.9 square degrees, which is one-sixteenth of ZTF’s full field of view. (ZTF Photo / D. Goldstein / R. Hurt / Caltech) A state-of-the-art astronomical camera system in California…
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Hey, kids! Here’s your chance to re-enact the Apollo 11 moon landing with robots
A Lego Mindstorms robot, with a plastic astronaut strapped to the front, approaches a toy lunar lander during an Apollo moon mission re-enactment. (University of Washington Photo / Dennis Wise) Fifty years after the first Apollo moon landing, students from across the country will get a chance to re-enact the feat with drones and robots,…
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Supernova leftovers preserve evidence of a messy blowup that wrecked two stars
This artist’s view shows a white dwarf star accumulating material from a nearby red giant star. Ultimately, the white dwarf erupts into a supernova. (Instituto de Astrofísica de Canaria Illustration / Romano Corradi) In what sounds like a cosmic episode of “CSI,” sleuthing astronomers have figured out what touched off a stellar explosion 545 million…
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Asteroid Institute’s first fellows come with credentials that are out of this world
The Asteroid Detection Analysis and Mapping software, or ADAM, can plot the courses of multiple asteroids and other celestial bodies, as shown in this visualization. (B612 Asteroid Institute via YouTube) A Silicon Valley institute focusing on the perils and prospects posed by near-Earth objects has chosen its first senior research fellows to work at the…