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Lockheed Fire
On August 12, 2009, the Lock
8/18/09
| Description |
On August 12, 2009, the Lockheed Fire broke out in the mountains southwest of San Jose, California, and burned through an estimated 2,600 acres of brush and timber by the morning of August 14. The fire was burning about 4 miles northwest of the town of Boulder Creek, and at least 2,000 people had been forced to evacuate their homes. This photo-like image of the fire was captured by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA's Aqua satellite on August 13. The red outlines mark the location where the sensor detected active fire. A narrow but dense plume of smoke slices across the mouth of Monterey Bay, stretching past the city of Santa Cruz toward Monterey. The landscape of this part of California is one of redwoods and fir trees, and it appears lushly green in this image. But mixed with these forests are tracts of chaparral (landscapes dominated by fire-adapted, drought-tolerant shrubs and grasses) and large stands of highly flammable knobcone pine. Hot, fast-moving fires are a natural part of this landscape, and people's desire to suppress forest fires around their homes in recent decades has allowed some areas to become unnaturally overgrown and primed for wildfire. NASA image courtesy Jeff Schmaltz, MODIS Rapid Response Team. Caption by Rebecca Lindsey. |
| Date |
8/18/09 |
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Santa Cruz Island, Calif. L
This space radar image shows
2/22/96
| Date |
2/22/96 |
| Description |
This space radar image shows the rugged topography of Santa Cruz Island, part of the Channel Islands National Park in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Santa Barbara and Ventura, Calif. Santa Cruz, the largest island of the national park, is host to hundreds of species of plants, animals and birds, at least eight of which are known nowhere else in the world. The island is bisected by the Santa Cruz Island fault, which appears as a prominent line running from the upper left to the lower right in this image. The fault is part of the Transverse Range fault system, which extends eastward from this area across Los Angeles to near Palm Springs, Calif. Color variations in this image are related to the different types of vegetation and soils at the surface. For example, grass-covered coastal lowlands appear gold, while chaparral and other scrub areas appear pink and blue. The image is 35 kilometers by 32 kilometers (22 miles by 20 miles) and is centered at 33.8 degrees north latitude, 119.6 degrees west longitude. North is toward upper right. The colors are assigned to different radar frequencies and polarizations as follows: red is L-band, horizontally transmitted and received, green is C-band, horizontally transmitted and received, and blue is C-band, horizontally transmitted and vertically received. The image was acquired by the Spaceborne Imaging Radar-C/X-band Synthetic Aperture Radar (SIR-C/X-SAR) on October 10, 1994, onboard the space shuttle Endeavour. SIR-C/X-SAR, a joint mission of the German, Italian and United States space agencies, is part of NASA's Mission to Planet Earth program. ##### |
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San Jose region, California
This radar image provides a
1/22/98
| Date |
1/22/98 |
| Description |
This radar image provides a high-tech view of Silicon Valley and shows the utility of radar data for mapping land use patterns. This image shows the San Jose metropolitan area in the Santa Clara Valley in central California. The Valley lies between the Santa Cruz Mountains to the southwest (left side of image) and the Diablo Range to the northeast (right side of image). The San Andreas fault is the linear feature along the left side of the image. Dark patches in the Diablo Range are sparsely vegetated slopes. Blue features at the top of the image are salt evaporators at the southern end of San Francisco Bay (black area). The dark linear feature in the image center is San Jose airport. The runways of Moffett Field Naval Air Station/NASA Ames Research Center are visible along the edge of the bay. The Stanford University Linear Accelerator is the bright white linear feature in the upper left of the image. The area shown is 49 by 64 kilometers (30 by 40 miles) centered at 37.31 degrees north latitude, 121.8 degrees west longitude. Colors are assigned to different radar frequencies and polarizations as follows: red is L-band horizontally transmitted, horizontally received, green is C-band horizontally transmitted, horizontally received, and blue is C-band horizontally transmitted, vertically received. The image was acquired by the Spaceborne Imaging Radar-C/X-band Synthetic Aperture Radar (SIR-C/X-SAR) imaging radar when it flew aboard the space shuttle Endeavour on October 2, 1994. |
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San Jose close-up, Californi
The city of San Jose is seen
1/22/98
| Date |
1/22/98 |
| Description |
The city of San Jose is seen on this radar image of the northern end of the Santa Clara Valley in central California. The Valley lies between the Santa Cruz Mountains to the southwest (left side of image) and the Diablo Range to the northeast (right side of image). The San Andreas fault is the linear feature along the left side of the image. Dark patches in the Diablo Range are sparsely vegetated slopes. Blue features at the top of the image are salt evaporators at the southern end of San Francisco Bay (black area). The dark linear feature in the lower center is the San Jose airport. The runways of Moffett Field Naval Air Station/NASA Ames Research Center are visible along the edge of the bay. The Stanford University Linear Accelerator is the bright white linear feature in the upper left of the image. The area shown is 35 by 27 kilometers (22 by 17 miles) centered at 37.4 degrees north latitude, 122.1 degrees west longitude. Colors are assigned to different radar frequencies and polarizations as follows: red is L-band horizontally transmitted, horizontally received, green is C-band horizontally transmitted, horizontally received, and blue is C-band horizontally transmitted, vertically received. The image was acquired by the Spaceborne Imaging Radar-C/X-band Synthetic Aperture Radar (SIR-C/X-SAR) imaging radar when it flew aboard the space shuttle Endeavour on October 2, 1994. |
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Teide Volcano Tenerife, Cana
This radar image shows the T
8/10/95
| Date |
8/10/95 |
| Description |
This radar image shows the Teide volcano on the island of Tenerife in the Canary Islands. The Canary Islands, part of Spain, are located in the eastern Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Morocco. Teide has erupted only once in the 20th Century, in 1909, but is considered a potentially threatening volcano due to its proximity to the city of Santa Cruz de Tenerife, shown in this image as the purple and white area on the lower right edge of the island. The summit crater of Teide, clearly visible in the left center of the image, contains lava flows of various ages and roughnesses that appear in shades of green and brown. Different vegetation zones, both natural and agricultural, are detected by the radar as areas of purple, green and yellow on the volcano's flanks. Scientists are using images such as this to understand the evolution of the structure of Teide, especially the formation of the summit caldera and the potential for collapse of the flanks. The volcano is one of 15 identified by scientists as potentially hazardous to local populations, as part of the international "Decade Volcano" program. The image was acquired by the Spaceborne Imaging Radar-C/X-Band Synthetic Aperture Radar (SIR-C/X-SAR) onboard the space shuttle Endeavour on October 11, 1994. SIR-C/X-SAR, a joint mission of the German, Italian and the United States space agencies, is part of NASA's Mission to Planet Earth. The image is centered at 28.3 degrees North latitude and 16.6 degrees West longitude. North is toward the upper right. The area shown measures 90 kilometers by 54.5 kilometers (55.8 miles by 33.8 miles). The colors in the image are assigned to different frequencies and polarizations of the radar as follows: red is L-band horizontally transmitted, horizontally received, green is L-band horizontally transmitted, vertically received, blue is C-band horizontally transmitted, vertically received. ##### |
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Multiwavelength M81
| Title |
Multiwavelength M81 |
| Description |
This beautiful galaxy is tilted at an oblique angle on to our line of sight, giving a "birds-eye view" of the spiral structure. The galaxy is similar to our Milky Way, but our favorable view provides a better picture of the typical architecture of spiral galaxies. M81 may be undergoing a surge of star formation along the spiral arms due to a close encounter it may have had with its nearby spiral galaxy NGC 3077 and a nearby starburst galaxy (M82) about 300 million years ago. M81 is one of the brightest galaxies that can be seen from the Earth. It is high in the northern sky in the circumpolar constellation Ursa Major, the Great Bear. At an apparent magnitude of 6.8 it is just at the limit of naked-eye visibility. The galaxy's angular size is about the same as that of the Full Moon. This image combines data from the Hubble Space Telescope, the Spitzer Space Telescope, and the Galaxy Evolution Explorer (GALEX) missions. The GALEX ultraviolet data were from the far-UV portion of the spectrum (135 to 175 nanometers). The Spitzer infrared data were taken with the IRAC 4 detector (8 microns). The Hubble data were taken at the blue portion of the spectrum. |
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Hubble Ultra Deep Field
| Title |
Hubble Ultra Deep Field |
| Description |
In this image of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, several objects are identified as the faintest, most compact galaxies ever observed in the distant universe. They are so far away that we see them as they looked less than one billion years after the Big Bang. Blazing with the brilliance of millions of stars, each of the newly discovered galaxies is a hundred to a thousand times smaller than our Milky Way Galaxy. The detection required joint observations between Hubble and NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. Blue light seen by Hubble shows the presence of young stars. The absence of infrared light from Spitzer observations conclusively shows that these are truly young galaxies without an earlier generation of stars. |
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Hubble Space Telescope Image
| Name |
Hubble Space Telescope Image of central region of M15 |
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First Class of Female Astron
| Title |
First Class of Female Astronauts |
| Full Description |
From left to right are Shannon W. Lucid, Margaret Rhea Seddon, Kathryn D. Sullivan, Judith A. Resnik, Anna L. Fisher, and Sally K. Ride. NASA selected all six women as their first female astronaut candidates in January 1978, allowing them to enroll in a training program that they completed in August 1979. Shannon W. Lucid was born on January 14, 1943 in Shanghai, China but considers Bethany, Oklahoma to be her hometown. She spent many years at the University of Oklahoma, receiving a Bachelor in chemistry in 1963, a Master in biochemistry in 1970, and a Doctorate in biochemistry in 1973. Dr. Lucid flew on the STS-51G Discovery, STS-34 Atlantis, STS-43 Atlantis, and STS-58 Columbia shuttle missions, setting the record for female astronauts by logging 838 hours and 54 minutes in space. She also currently holds the United States single mission space flight endurance record for her 188 days on the Russian Space Station Mir. From February 2002 to September 2003, she served as chief scientist at NASA Headquarters before returning to JSC to help with the Return to Flight program after the STS-107 accident. Born November 8, 1947, in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, Margaret Rhea Seddon received a Doctorate of Medicine in 1973 from the University of Tennessee. She flew on space missions STS-51 Discovery, STS-40 Columbia, and STS-58 Columbia for a total of over 722 hours in space. Dr. Seddon retired from NASA in November 1997, taking on a position as the Assistant Chief Medical Officer of the Vanderbilt Medical Group in Nashville, Tennessee. Kathryn Sullivan was born October 3, 1951 in Patterson, New Jersey but considers Woodland Hills, California to be her hometown. She received a Bachelor in Earth Sciences from the University of California, Santa Cruz in 1973 and a Doctorate in Geology from Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia in 1978. She flew on space missions STS-41G, STS-31, and STS-45 and logged a total of 532 hours in space. Dr. Sullivan left NASA in August 1992 to assume the position of Chief Scientist of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). She later went on to serve as President and CEO of the Center of Science and Industry in Columbus, Ohio. Dr. Judith Resnik was born April 5, 1949 in Akron, Ohio. She received a Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering from Carnegie-Mellon University in 1970, and a Doctorate in Electrical Engineering from University of Maryland in 1977. Dr. Resnik left a job as a senior systems engineer in product development with Xerox Corporation at El Segundo, California to work for NASA in 1978. She died on January 28, 1986 on her second mission, during the launch of Challenger STS-51-L. Anna Fisher was born August 24, 1949 in New York City, New York hometown. She received a Doctorate in Medicine in 1976 and a Master of Science in Chemistry in 1987, both from the University of California, Los Angeles. Dr. Fisher flew on STS-51A, the Space Shuttle Discovery's November 8, 1984, mission, and logged 192 hours in space, her second schedule mission was cancelled after the Space Shuttle Challenger STS-51L accident. She remains with NASA, where she has filled many positions over decades of service. Dr. Sally Ride was the first American woman in space. Born on May 26, 1951 in Los Angeles, California, she went on to receive a Bachelor in Physics and English in 1973 from Stanford University and, later, a Master in Physics in 1975 and a Doctorate in Physics in 1978, also from Stanford. She began her astronaut career as a mission specialist on STS-7, which launched from Kennedy Space Center, Florida on June 18, 1983, and later went on to fly on STS-41G. She withdrew from training for her third scheduled mission in order to serve on the investigative committee for the Space Shuttle Challenger accident and never returned to training, although she went on to work for headquarters and later to serve on the Columbia Accident Investigation Board before returning to the private sector as a physics professor. |
| Date |
02/28/1979 |
| NASA Center |
Johnson Space Center |
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Hubble Peers Deep into the C
| Title |
Hubble Peers Deep into the Crowded Heart of the Densest Known Star Cluster |
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Hubble Space Telescope Finds
| Title |
Hubble Space Telescope Finds Stellar Graveyard |
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World's Most Powerful Telesc
| Title |
World's Most Powerful Telescopes Team Up With a Lens in Nature to Discover Farthest Galaxy in the Universe |
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World's Most Powerful Telesc
| Title |
World's Most Powerful Telescopes Team Up With a Lens in Nature to Discover Farthest Galaxy in the Universe |
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World's Most Powerful Telesc
| Title |
World's Most Powerful Telescopes Team Up With a Lens in Nature to Discover Farthest Galaxy in the Universe |
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World's Most Powerful Telesc
| Title |
World's Most Powerful Telescopes Team Up With a Lens in Nature to Discover Farthest Galaxy in the Universe |
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The Secret Lives of Galaxies
| Title |
The Secret Lives of Galaxies Unveiled in Deep Survey |
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The Secret Lives of Galaxies
| Title |
The Secret Lives of Galaxies Unveiled in Deep Survey |
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The Secret Lives of Galaxies
| Title |
The Secret Lives of Galaxies Unveiled in Deep Survey |
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The Secret Lives of Galaxies
| Title |
The Secret Lives of Galaxies Unveiled in Deep Survey |
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The Secret Lives of Galaxies
| Title |
The Secret Lives of Galaxies Unveiled in Deep Survey |
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The Secret Lives of Galaxies
| Title |
The Secret Lives of Galaxies Unveiled in Deep Survey |
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The Secret Lives of Galaxies
| Title |
The Secret Lives of Galaxies Unveiled in Deep Survey |
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The Secret Lives of Galaxies
| Title |
The Secret Lives of Galaxies Unveiled in Deep Survey |
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The Secret Lives of Galaxies
| Title |
The Secret Lives of Galaxies Unveiled in Deep Survey |
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The Secret Lives of Galaxies
| Title |
The Secret Lives of Galaxies Unveiled in Deep Survey |
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The Secret Lives of Galaxies
| Title |
The Secret Lives of Galaxies Unveiled in Deep Survey |
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The Secret Lives of Galaxies
| Title |
The Secret Lives of Galaxies Unveiled in Deep Survey |
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Hubble's Largest Galaxy Port
| Title |
Hubble's Largest Galaxy Portrait Offers a New High-Definition View |
| General Information |
What is Hubble Heritage? A monthly showcase of new and archival Hubble images. Go to the Heritage site. Giant galaxies weren?t assembled in a day. Neither was this Hubble Space Telescope image of the face-on spiral galaxy Messier 101 (M101). It is the largest and most detailed photo of a spiral galaxy that has ever been released from Hubble. The galaxy?s portrait is actually composed of 51 individual exposures taken with Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys and the Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 in March 1994, September 1994, June 1999, November 2002, and January 2003. The newly composed image also includes elements from images from ground-based photos. |
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Hubble's Largest Galaxy Port
| Title |
Hubble's Largest Galaxy Portrait Offers a New High-Definition View |
| General Information |
What is Hubble Heritage? A monthly showcase of new and archival Hubble images. Go to the Heritage site. Giant galaxies weren?t assembled in a day. Neither was this Hubble Space Telescope image of the face-on spiral galaxy Messier 101 (M101). It is the largest and most detailed photo of a spiral galaxy that has ever been released from Hubble. The galaxy?s portrait is actually composed of 51 individual exposures taken with Hubble's Advanced Camera for Surveys and the Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 in March 1994, September 1994, June 1999, November 2002, and January 2003. The newly composed image also includes elements from images from ground-based photos. |
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NASA's Hubble Finds Hundreds
| Title |
NASA's Hubble Finds Hundreds of Young Galaxies in Early Universe |
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NASA's Hubble Finds Hundreds
| Title |
NASA's Hubble Finds Hundreds of Young Galaxies in Early Universe |
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NASA's Hubble Finds Hundreds
| Title |
NASA's Hubble Finds Hundreds of Young Galaxies in Early Universe |
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NASA's Hubble Finds Hundreds
| Title |
NASA's Hubble Finds Hundreds of Young Galaxies in Early Universe |
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Hubble Finds that Earth is S
| Title |
Hubble Finds that Earth is Safe from One Class of Gamma-ray Burst |
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Hubble Finds that Earth is S
| Title |
Hubble Finds that Earth is Safe from One Class of Gamma-ray Burst |
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Hubble Finds that Earth is S
| Title |
Hubble Finds that Earth is Safe from One Class of Gamma-ray Burst |
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Hubble Finds that Earth is S
| Title |
Hubble Finds that Earth is Safe from One Class of Gamma-ray Burst |
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Hubble Finds that Earth is S
| Title |
Hubble Finds that Earth is Safe from One Class of Gamma-ray Burst |
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Hubble Finds that Earth is S
| Title |
Hubble Finds that Earth is Safe from One Class of Gamma-ray Burst |
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Hubble Finds that Earth is S
| Title |
Hubble Finds that Earth is Safe from One Class of Gamma-ray Burst |
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Hubble Finds that Earth is S
| Title |
Hubble Finds that Earth is Safe from One Class of Gamma-ray Burst |
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Hubble Sees Faintest Stars i
| Title |
Hubble Sees Faintest Stars in a Globular Cluster |
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Hubble Sees Faintest Stars i
| Title |
Hubble Sees Faintest Stars in a Globular Cluster |
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Hubble Sees Faintest Stars i
| Title |
Hubble Sees Faintest Stars in a Globular Cluster |
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Hubble Sees Faintest Stars i
| Title |
Hubble Sees Faintest Stars in a Globular Cluster |
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Hubble Sees Faintest Stars i
| Title |
Hubble Sees Faintest Stars in a Globular Cluster |
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Hubble Captures Galaxy in th
| Title |
Hubble Captures Galaxy in the Making |
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Tracing the Evolution of the
| Title |
Tracing the Evolution of the First Galaxies in the Universe |
| General Information |
What is a News Nugget? News Nuggets are bulletins from the world of astronomy. A systematic search for the first bright galaxies to form in the early universe has revealed a dramatic jump in the number of such galaxies around 13 billion years ago. These observations of the earliest stages in the evolution of galaxies provide new evidence for the hierarchical theory of galaxy formation -- the idea that large galaxies built up over time as smaller galaxies collided and merged. Astronomers at the University of California, Santa Cruz, used NASA's Hubble Space Telescope to explore the formation of galaxies during the first 900 million years after the Big Bang. They reported their latest findings in the September 14 issue of the journal Nature. Deep observations in three dark patches of sky -- the Hubble Ultra Deep Field and the Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey fields -- gathered the faint light emitted 13 billion years ago by stars in primeval galaxies. Only the brightest galaxies could be detected at such great distances. The researchers observed hundreds of bright galaxies at around 900 million years after the Big Bang. But when they looked deeper, about 200 million years earlier in time, they only found one. Relaxing their search criteria a bit turned up a few more candidates, so there must have been a lot of merging of smaller galaxies during those 200 million years. This panel shows four candidate galaxies that are likely to have redshifts of 7 and thus have emitted their light when the universe was just 750 million years old. Astronomers can determine when light was emitted from a distant source by its redshift, a measure of how the expansion of the universe stretched the wavelengths of the light as it traveled through space across vast distances. |
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Hubble Captures Galaxy in th
| Title |
Hubble Captures Galaxy in the Making |
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Hubble Approaches the Final
| Title |
Hubble Approaches the Final Frontier: The Dawn of Galaxies |
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