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Final Boeing-built GPS satellite goes into orbit

Image: Atlas 5 launch
United Launch Alliance’s Atlas 5 rocket rises from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida, carrying the GPS IIF-12 satellite into space. (Credit: United Launch Alliance)

The last GPS Block IIF satellite built by the Boeing Co. was sent into orbit for the U.S. Air Force today, filling out a set of a dozen.

United Launch Alliance’s Atlas 5 rocket carried the 3,500-pound GPS IIF-12 satellite into space from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida at the start of today’s launch window, at 8:38 a.m. ET (5:38 a.m. PT). Hours later, the rocket’s Centaur upper stage put the satellite into a 12,700-mile-high orbit.

Today’s launch was the first one of the year for United Launch Alliance, which is a Boeing-Lockheed Martin joint venture.

The 12 Block IIF satellites are part of the Air Force’s Global Positioning System constellation, which provides navigation data for users worldwide. Those users range from Air Force controllers calling in air strikes to drivers, sailors and hikers trying to figure out how to get where they want to go.

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Pluto probe spots ice islands in a nitrogen sea

Image: Pluto's icy hills
This image focuses in on a part of Pluto’s heart-shaped region where hills of water ice appear to be floating on top of a nitrogen glacier. Challenger Colles, toward the top of the inset photo, is a wide cluster of water-ice hills. (Credit: NASA / JHUAPL / SwRI)

There’s plenty of evidence that Pluto is a frozen water world, with mountains of ice that rise more than 10,000 feet in height, but here’s something even weirder: Huge chunks of frozen H2O appear to be floating in a sea of frozen nitrogen, like icebergs in Earth’s polar regions.

Those are among the findings reported on Feb. 4 in this week’s update from NASA’s New Horizons mission. The piano-sized New Horizons spacecraft collected gigabytes’ worth of observations last year during its July 14 flyby, and it’s been sending back data ever since then.

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After gravity-wave rumors, it’s go time for LIGO

Image: LIGO optics
Optics technician Gary Traylor uses a light to inspect one of the laser-reflecting mirrors at the LIGO facility in Livingston, La. (Credit: Matt Heintze / Caltech / MIT / LIGO Lab)

The scientists behind the Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory are getting ready to reveal their latest findings, amid a flurry of speculation over whether or not they’ve made the first-ever detection of waves rippling through spacetime.

Fred Raab, the head of the LIGO laboratory in Hanford, Wash., isn’t telling.

“As we have done for the past 15 years, we take data, analyze the data, write up the results for publication in scientific journals, and once the results are accepted for publication, we announce results broadly on the day of publication or shortly thereafter,” he told GeekWire in an email.

In a follow-up phone call, Raab noted that if the historical trend holds true, the results should be ready to submit for publication as early as this month.

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NASA finishes huge mirror for Webb Telescope

Image: Webb Telescope mirror
The James Webb Space Telescope’s 18 mirrors are fully installed. (Credit: Chris Gunn / NASA)

NASA has put the 18th and final piece of the puzzle into place for the $8.8 billionJames Webb Space Telescope’s primary mirror – marking a major milestone on the way to the observatory’s launch in 2018.

The 21.3-foot-wide mirror is so big it couldn’t be fabricated in one piece. Instead, it’s made up of 18 hexagonal segments, each spanning a little more than 4 feet and weighing about 88 pounds. The last segment was carefully laid into place using a clawlike robotic arm at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland on Feb. 3.

“With the mirrors finally complete, we are one step closer to the audacious observations that will unravel the mysteries of the universe,” John Grunsfeld, NASA’s associate administrator for science, said in a news release.

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Fusion ‘pretzel’ fires up first hydrogen plasma

Image: Wendelstein 7-X
The first hydrogen plasma lights up the interior of the Wendelstein 7-X fusion device. (Credit: IPP)

Hydrogen plasma was produced for the first time on Feb. 3 in Germany’s Wendelstein 7-X fusion device, which has been called the “reactor designed in hell” as well as the“pretzel that could save Planet Earth.”

The Wendelstein 7-X was built at the Max Planck Institute of Plasma Physics in Greifswald at a cost of €1 billion ($1.1 billion). The device, known as a stellarator, is built to contain superheated plasma inside a magnetic chamber with a tangled, pretzel-like configuration.

Physicists at the institute are hoping that the crazy-looking design will keep the plasma stable for extended periods within the magnetic field. That’s been an issue for plasma chambers with a more typical doughnut-like design, which are called tokamaks.

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Astronaut pokes fun at Windows during training

Image: Thomas Pesquet
French astronaut Thomas Pesquet undergoes training in a Soyuz spacecraft simulator in 2014 at Russia’s Star City cosmonaut training center. (Credit: ESA)

Moscow, we have a problem: Russia’s cosmonaut training center in Star City might need to upgrade its Soyuz spacecraft simulators to Windows 10.

Based on some snapshots tweeted by French astronaut Thomas Pesquet, it looks as if Russia’s space agency has been getting by with Microsoft Windows XP. And that became the source of a little levity when Pesquet encountered a simulated spaceflight alarm.

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NASA puts Pluto and its heart on a valentine

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Pluto is all smiles in NASA’s valentine. (Credit: NASA)

Say it with Pluto? After NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft spotted a heart-shaped region on Pluto, you had to know it was just a matter of time before the dwarf planet made its appearance on a valentine.

Sure enough, this year’s crop of printable Valentine’s Day cards from NASA’s educational Space Place website includes a stylized Pluto.

“You’ll always be in my heart!” the card reads.

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Editas raises $94 million in gene-editing IPO

Image: CRISPR-Cas9 at work
CRISPR-Cas9 technology uses “molecular scissors” to cut and splice DNA, as shown in this computer animation. (Credit: McGovern Institute for Brain Research, MIT)

Editas Medicine’s entry into the stock market with a $94.4 million initial public offering appears to be sparking positive signals for the company as well as the nascent gene-editing industry.

That’s not only because the Massachusetts-based startup, which lists Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates among its investors, was able to sell 5.9 million shares handily at a price of $16 a share. It’s also because the stock’s price trended upward during the company’s first hours of public trading on the NASDAQ exchange Feb. 3.

There have been lots of questions surrounding Editas, the biotech industry and the IPO market as a whole: Editas’ offering was the first IPO of the year, ending a drought sparked by concerns about stock market volatility.

What’s more, biotech stocks have been caught up in a riptide over the past few months. And on top of all that, Editas is heading into a dispute over patents relating to the CRISPR-Cas9 gene-editing technology.

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Blue Origin reveals the rocket road ahead

Image: Blue Origin blastoff
Blue Origin’s New Shepard prototype spaceship blasts off in January. (Credit: Blue Origin)

Blue Origin, the space venture founded by Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos, is lifting the curtain just a bit on its future plans for rocket engines and spaceflights.

One of the revelations relates to progress on its methane-fueled BE-4 rocket engine, which is on track to provide propulsion for United Launch Alliance’s next-generation Vulcan rocket. Blue Origin tweeted out a picture of the engine’s bell, most likely taken at the company’s production facility in Kent, Wash.:

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Giant rocket will carry tiny high-tech satellites

Image: Lunar Flashlight
An artist’s conception shows Lunar Flashlight flying above a crater on the moon. (Credit: NASA)

NASA says it’ll send 13 miniaturized satellites – including a pop-up solar sail and a “lunar flashlight” – beyond Earth orbit when it flies its heavy-lift Space Launch System rocket for the first time in 2018.

The main payload for the test flight, known as Exploration Mission-1 or EM-1, is an uncrewed prototype for NASA’s Orion spaceship. The SLS will send Orion into a highly eccentric orbit that ranges beyond the moon and back.

But there’s also room inside the rocket’s adapter ring for a baker’s dozen of CubeSats, boxy spacecraft of a standard size that are becoming increasingly popular for low-cost space missions.

“They’re really on the cutting edge of technology,” NASA Deputy Administrator Dava Newman said today during a news conference at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama.

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