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Delta rocket blasts off
The NOAA-N weather satellite is launched aboard a Boeing Delta 2 rocket from Vandenberg Air Force Base, California.
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NOAA pre-launch
Officials from NASA, NOAA, the Air Force and Boeing hold the pre-launch news conference at Vandenberg Air Force Base to preview the mission of a Delta 2 rocket and the NOAA-N weather satellite. (29min 54sec file)
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Shuttle test count
Watch shuttle Discovery's countdown dress rehearsal that ends with a simulated main engine shutdown and post-abort safing practice. (13min 19sec file)
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Astronaut Hall of Fame
The 2005 class of Gordon Fullerton, Joe Allen and Bruce McCandless is inducted into the U.S. Astronaut Hall of Fame at the Saturn 5 Center on April 30. (1hr 24min 55sec file)
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Bright ice, dirty ice at Saturn
CASSINI PHOTO RELEASE Posted: May 21, 2005
Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute Download larger image version here
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Saturn's icy moon Enceladus hovers above Saturn's exquisite rings in this color view from Cassini. The rings, made of nearly pure water ice, have also become somewhat contaminated by meteoritic dust during their history, which may span several hundred million years. Enceladus shares the rings' nearly pure water ice composition, but appears to have eluded dust contamination through resurfacing processes that scientists are still trying to understand. Enceladus is 505 kilometers (314 miles) across.
Dust affects the rings' color, while differences in brightness are attributable to varying particle sizes and concentrations.
The images for this natural color view were taken with the Cassini spacecraft narrow-angle camera at a distance of approximately 2.2 million kilometers (1.4 million miles) from Saturn through red, green and blue spectral filters. The image scale is 13 kilometers (8 miles) 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 team is based at the Space Science Institute, Boulder, Colo.
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