As it circles Earth, NASA's Interstellar Boundary Explorer hunts for particles streaming in from beyond the solar system. It has intercepted hydrogen, helium, neon and oxygen atoms. IBEX principal investigator Dave McComas discusses how the abundance of those atoms hints at the Milky Way's composition.

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NASA's iconic images of Earth from space date back to the late 1960s--with snapshots taken by Apollo astronauts. The modern "blue marble" images are captured by machines and they're not photos. They're datasets collected by instruments aboard satellites and then translated into imagery on the ground.

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The images from NASA's Gravity Recovery And Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) lunar spacecraft offer a fresh view of the moon's far side.

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This week solar flares sent a huge blast of X-rays and charged particles screaming towards the Earth. Solar astronomer David Hathaway and physicist Doug Biesecker discuss the sun's explosive behavior, and how that 'space weather' affects satellites, airplanes and the electric grid.

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A 33,000-year-old skull of a "wolf on the way to becoming a dog" was found in a Siberian cave. Evolutionary Biologist Susan Crockford, co-author of a study about the skull in PLoS ONE, discusses why the discovery challenges common beliefs about dog domestication.

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Astronomers want increasingly large telescopes to peer into the depths of space. To build a solid telescope mirror nearly 30 feet across, you need an oven that heats to 2,100 degrees Fahrenheit and spins around like a top.

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During a campaign stop on Florida's Space Coast, Republican presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich promised a permanent moon base within eight years if he's elected. The self-described space nut says his plans would provide a boost to the region that's been hit hard by the recession and the U.S. space program's uncertain future.

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The space agency's latest composite image of Earth offers a detailed view of North and Central America. It's one in a long line of "Blue Marble" shots since the original was taken by the Apollo 17 crew in 1972.

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NASA ended the U.S. shuttle program in 2011, leaving roughly 9,000 workers at the Kennedy Space Center without jobs. Many in Cape Canaveral hope the private space industry will blossom, and lead the way back into space, and back to work.

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The biggest solar storm in years has lit up the skies with the spectacular show known as the Northern Lights. The Aurora Borealis offers a spectacle of green and blue over Canada and Northern Europe. The big storm is treating stargazers as far south as England — and may well make up for the disruptions it could bring to the electrical grid and GPS signals.

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Science historian Howard Markel discusses the origins of the word moon and some of the lore surrounding it, including a 1638 book by the English bishop Francis Godwin entitled The Man in the Moone, which recounts a science fiction-style voyage to the moon.

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Scientists have confirmed that rocks collected recently in the Moroccan desert came from the Red Planet. University of Alberta meteorite expert Chris Herd, who has acquired one of the chunks, talks about how scientists analyze space rocks, and whether organic compounds might be found inside.

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Pieces from the Phobos-Ground, which had become stuck in Earth's orbit, landed in water Sunday 1,250 kilometers west of Wellington Island in Chile's south, the Russian military Air and Space Defense Forces said in a statement carried by the country's news agencies.

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One upon a time, the largest glass telescope mirror was 100 inches in diameter. Today, scientists are casting a mirror 27 feet in diameter that will be part of one of the most powerful telescopes on Earth. NPR's Joe Palca speaks with weekends on All Things Considered host Guy Raz from the mirror laboratory, located under the football stadium at the University of Arizona.

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At a meeting of the American Astronomical Society, scientists talked about mapping dark matter, measuring the 'graininess' of spacetime, and discovering the smallest exoplanets ever, using the Kepler space telescope. Ron Cowen, who reported on the meeting for Nature, discusses those findings.

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