#planetary-science

#planetary-science

Going into the appropriations process, the president called for a 24 percent year over year reduction to NASA's total operating budget. As part of that plan, the White House wanted to reduce the Science Mission Directorate's funding by nearly half, a move that would have forced NASA to cancel 55 ongoing and planned missions, including efforts like OSIRIS-APEX. The bill effectively rejects President Trump's plan, reducing NASA's total operating budget by just 1.6 percent year over year to $24.4 billion.

If the moon were to suddenly turn to cheese, the movie pitches would be insufferable. Astronauts would be irritated, grad students would be demoralized and news articles would overflow with terrible puns. The great jaws of the Internet would get hold of the details, churning out doomsday scenarios, memes and conspiracies. And that's even before the moon cheese would start to compress, creating geysers of material and a dangerously unstable lunar landscape.

Saturn's rings were likely first seen by Galileo in 1610, who could only see a pair of blobs due to the quality of his telescope.

This is a remarkable opportunity," said Bobby Braun, who leads space exploration for the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, in an interview. "From a probability standpoint, there's not going to be another chance to study a killer asteroid like this for thousands of years.

The observations indicate the possible self-destruction of a Jupiter-sized planet as it headed toward its parent star, marking the first recorded instance of "planetary suicide."

The most advanced neutrino weigh-in so far has put a new upper limit on the enigmatic particle's mass, capping it at 0.45 electron volts (eV).