New way of finding big star explosions

For the first time, astronomers have found a supernova explosion with properties similar to a "gamma-ray burst", but without seeing any gamma rays from it.

The discovery, using the US National Science Foundation's Very Large Array (VLA) radio telescope, promises, the scientists say, to point the way toward locating many more examples of these mysterious explosions.

"We think that radio observations will soon be a more powerful tool for finding this kind of supernova in the nearby Universe than gamma-ray satellites," said Alicia Soderberg, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics.

The telltale clue came when the radio observations showed material blasted from the supernova explosion, dubbed SN2009bb, at speeds approaching that of light. This characterised the supernova, first seen in March 2009, as the type thought to produce one kind of gamma-ray burst.

"It is remarkable that very low-energy radiation, radio waves, can signal a very high-energy event," said Roger Chevalier of the University of Virginia.
Explosive reaction

When the nuclear fusion reactions at the cores of very massive stars no longer can provide the energy needed to hold the core up against the weight of the rest of the star, the core collapses catastrophically into a superdense neutron star or black hole. The rest of the star's material is blasted into space in a supernova explosion.

For the past decade or so, astronomers have identified one particular type of such a "core-collapse supernova" as the cause of one kind of gamma-ray burst.

Not all supernovae of this type, however, produce gamma-ray bursts. "Only about one out of a hundred do this," according to Soderberg.

In the more-common type of such a supernova, the explosion blasts the star's material outward in a roughly-spherical pattern at speeds that, while fast, are only about 3 percent of the speed of light. In the supernovae that produce gamma-ray bursts, some, but not all, of the ejected material is accelerated to nearly the speed of light.

The superfast speeds in these rare blasts, astronomers say, are caused by an "engine" in the centre of the supernova explosion that resembles a scaled-down version of a "quasar". Material falling toward the core enters a swirling cloud surrounding the newly-formed neutron star or black hole. This cloud produces jets of material boosted at tremendous speeds from the poles of the cloud.

"This is the only way we know that a supernova explosion could accelerate material to such speeds," Soderberg said.

Until now, no such "engine-driven" supernova had been found any way other than by detecting gamma rays emitted by it.

"Discovering such a supernova by observing its radio emission, rather than through gamma rays, is a breakthrough. With the new capabilities of the Expanded VLA coming soon, we believe we'll find more in the future through radio observations than with gamma-ray satellites," Soderberg said.
More than one kind

Why didn't anyone see gamma rays from this explosion? "We know that the gamma-ray emission is beamed in such blasts, and this one may have been pointed away from Earth and thus not seen," Soderberg said. In that case, finding such blasts through radio observations will allow scientists to discover a much larger percentage of them in the future.

"Another possibility," Soderberg adds, "is that the gamma rays were 'smothered' as they tried to escape the star. This is perhaps the more exciting possibility since it implies that we can find and identify engine-driven supernovae that lack detectable gamma rays and thus go unseen by gamma-ray satellites."

One important question the scientists hope to answer is just what causes the difference between the "ordinary" and the "engine-driven" core-collapse supernovae.

"There must be some rare physical property that separates the stars that produce the 'engine-driven' blasts from their more-normal cousins," Soderberg said. "We'd like to find out what that property is."
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New Mars probe will look for life signs

The European Space Agency (ESA) and NASA have invited scientists from across the world to propose instruments for their joint Mars mission, the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter.

Scheduled for launch in 2016, the spacecraft will focus on understanding the rarest constituents of the martian atmosphere, including the mysterious methane that could signal life on Mars.

Establishing whether life ever existed, or is still active on Mars today, is one of the outstanding scientific quests of our time. Both missions in the ExoMars programme will address this important goal.

ESA will build the Trace Gas Orbiter and NASA will launch it.

The priority for this mission is to map trace gases in the atmosphere of Mars, distinguishing individual chemical species down to concentrations of just a few parts per billion. Of these gases, one in particular attracts special attention: methane.

Discovered on Mars in 2003, it happens to be a possible 'biomarker', a gas that is readily produced by biological activity. Understanding whether the methane comes from life or from geological and volcanic processes takes precedence.

"The methane is the anchor point around which the science is to be constructed," says Vago.

Adding to the mystery is that methane was found to be concentrated in just three locations on Mars, and then disappeared much faster from the atmosphere than scientists were expecting.

This points to an unknown destruction mechanism much more powerful than any known on Earth. It may also indicate a much faster creation process to have produced such large quantities of the gas in the first place.

The space agencies issued an Announcement of Opportunity in January, inviting scientists to propose instruments to be carried on the mission. Once all proposals are in, they will be evaluated and the winning teams will be tasked with building the actual hardware.
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Alien invaders pack the Milky Way

Around a quarter of the star clusters in our Milky Way are invaders from other galaxies, new research from Swinburne University of Technology shows.

In a paper accepted for publication in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Swinburne astronomer Professor Duncan Forbes has shown that many of our galaxy's star clusters are actually foreigners—having been born elsewhere and then migrating to our Milky Way.

"It turns out that many of the stars and star clusters we see when we look into the night sky are not natives, but aliens from other galaxies," said Forbes. "They have made their way into our galaxy over the last few billion years."

Previously astronomers had suspected that some star clusters, which contain around a million stars each, were foreign to our galaxy, but it was difficult to positively identify which ones.

Using Hubble Space Telescope data, Forbes, along with his Canadian colleague Professor Terry Bridges, examined old star clusters within the Milky Way galaxy.

They then compiled the largest ever high-quality database to record the age and chemical properties of each of these clusters.

"Using this database we were able to identify key signatures in many of the star clusters that gave us tell-tale clues as to their external origin," Forbes said.

"We determined that these foreign-born star clusters actually make up about one quarter of our Milky Way star cluster system. That implies tens of millions of accreted stars—those that have joined and grown our galaxy—from star clusters alone."

Gobbling up galaxies

The researchers' work also suggests that the Milky Way may have swallowed-up more dwarf galaxies than was previously thought.

"We found that many of the foreign clusters originally existed within dwarf galaxies—that is 'mini' galaxies of up to 100 million stars that sit within our larger Milky Way.

"Our work shows that there are more of these accreted dwarf galaxies in our Milky Way than was thought. Astronomers had been able to confirm the existence of two accreted dwarf galaxies in our Milky Way—but our research suggests that there might be as many as six yet to be discovered.

"Although the dwarf galaxies are broken-up and their stars assimilated into the Milky Way, the star clusters of the dwarf galaxy remain intact and survive the accretion process."

"This will have to be explored further, but it is a very exciting prospect that will help us to better understand the history of our own galaxy."

Forbes' research was carried out in Canada as part of an Australian Research Council International Fellowship.
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NASA's Stardust mission aims for comet

Just three days shy of one year before its planned flyby of comet Tempel 1, NASA's Stardust spacecraft has successfully performed a manoeuvre to adjust the time of its encounter by eight hours and 20 minutes.

The delay maximises the probability of the spacecraft capturing high-resolution images of the desired surface features of the 2.99-kilometre-wide potato-shaped mass of ice and dust.

With the spacecraft on the opposite side of the Solar System and beyond the orbit of Mars, Stardust's rockets fired for 22 minutes and 53 seconds, changing the spacecraft's speed by 24 metres per second.



Stardust's manoeuvre placed the spacecraft on a course to fly by the comet just before 11:42pm US Eastern Standard Time on February 14, 2011—Valentine's Day.
The time of closest approach to Tempel 1 is important because the comet rotates, allowing different regions of the comet to be illuminated by the Sun's rays at different times. Mission scientists want to maximise the probability that areas of interest previously imaged by NASA's Deep Impact mission in 2005 will also be bathed in the Sun's rays and visible to Stardust's camera when it passes by.

"We could not have asked for a better result from a burn with even a brand-new spacecraft," said Tim Larson, project manager for the Stardust-NExT at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

"This bird has already logged one comet flyby, one Earth return of the first samples ever collected from deep space, over 4,000 days of flight and approximately 5.4 billion kilometres since launch."
A recycled space mission

Launched on February 7, 1999, Stardust became the first spacecraft in history to collect samples from a comet and return them to Earth for study.

While its sample return capsule parachuted to Earth in January 2006, mission controllers were placing the still viable spacecraft on a trajectory that would allow NASA the opportunity to re-use the already-proven flight system if a target of opportunity presented itself.

In January 2007, NASA re-christened the mission "Stardust-NExT" (New Exploration of Tempel), and the Stardust team began a four-and-a-half year journey to comet Tempel 1. This will be humanity's second exploration of the comet—and the first time a comet has been "re-visited."

"Stardust-NExT will provide scientists the first opportunity to see the surface changes on a comet between successive visits into the inner Solar System," said Joe Veverka, principal investigator of Stardust-NExT from Cornell University.

"We have theories galore on how each close pass to the Sun causes changes to a comet. Stardust-NExT should give some teeth to some of these theories, and take a bite out of others."

Along with the high-resolution images of the comet's surface, Stardust-NExT will also measure the composition, size distribution, and flux of dust emitted into the coma ("head" of the comet), and provide important new information on how certain comets evolve and how they formed 4.6 billion years ago.

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Huawei U8300, cell phone Young Children

Huawei to create a new cell phone for young people, especially for those who like social networking, with the release of the smartphone Huawei U8300 Mobile World Congress event. Huawei also include the application of social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter in the U8300 Huawei cell phone has a QWERTY keyboard this. Mobile Huawei U8300 will be present in green, yellow, and purple.

Network:
-Quad-band GSM phone capable of global roaming (850/900/1800/1900 MHz)
-UMTS European / Asian 3G (2100 MHz)

Data:
-EDGE/UMTS/HSDPA 3.6 Mbit / s
-3G

Battery: Li - Ion
Display: touchscreen

Features:
Flash: LED
Multimedia Video Playback
Music Player MP3
microSD / microSDHC
Android Software
Full keyboard (QWERTY)

Connection:
Internet
HTML
USB
Bluetooth
Alarm, Calendar, To-Do / Tasks, Calculator, World Clock
Voice Recording, Speaker Phone
Email

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Access Facebook on Mobile Can Free!

Facebook continues to break through to spoil hundreds of millions of 'citizens'. After successfully with Lite m.facebook.com and Facebook, social networking sites now that make Facebook Zero. Is it?

Facebook Facebook Zero is for use via mobile browser. In accordance with the name 'Zero' which diusungnya, accessing Facebook via mobile phone will not charge for free aliases.

It's just a consequence, Facebook Zero shows only text-only or without photos. If Faceook The access switch to multimedia (plus photos), then he must pay the cost of telecommunications operators defined.

But wait, if you try to access the Facebooker zero.facebook.com on his cell phone today and then failed, it was reasonable. Because Zero requires cooperation with operators in each country and it is still in the process.

"Zero is a light version of m.facebook.com. Facebook Zero will encourage accessing Facebook via mobile phones and enables operators to embrace more mobile internet users," said Facebook spokeswoman Brandee Barker told Tech Crunch

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Atom experiment tests Einstein's redshift

While aircraft and rocket experiments have proved that gravity makes clocks tick more slowly—a central prediction of Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity—a new experiment has measured this slowdown 10,000 times more accurately than before, and finds it to be exactly what Einstein predicted.

The result shows once again how well Einstein's theory describes the real world, said Holger Muller, an assistant professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley.

"This experiment demonstrates that gravity changes the flow of time, a concept fundamental to the theory of general relativity," Muller said.

The phenomenon is often called the gravitational redshift because the oscillations of light waves slow down or become redder when tugged by gravity.

A report describing the experiment appears in the February 18 issue of the journal Nature.

Pushing atoms with lasers

Muller tested Einstein's theory by taking advantage of a tenet of quantum mechanics … that matter is both a particle and a wave. The caesium atoms used in the experiment can be represented by matter waves that oscillate nearly a million billion billion times per second.
When the caesium atom matter wave enters the experiment, it encounters a carefully tuned flash of laser light. The laws of quantum mechanics step in, and each caesium atom enters two alternate realities, Muller said. In one, the laser has pushed the atom up one-tenth of a millimetre, giving it a tiny boost out of Earth's gravitational field. In the other, the atom remains unmoved inside Earth's gravitational well, where time flies by less quickly.

While the frequency of caesium matter waves is too high to measure, Muller and his colleagues used the interference between the caesium matter waves in the alternate realities to measure the resulting difference between their oscillations, and thus the redshift.

The equations of general relativity predicted precisely the measured slowing of time, to an accuracy of about one part in 100 million—10,000 times more accurate than the measurements made 30 years ago using two hydrogen maser clocks, one on Earth and the other launched via rocket to a height of 10,000 kilometres.

Practical benefits

Far from merely theoretical, the results have implications for Earth's global positioning satellite system, for precision timekeeping and for gravitational wave detectors, Muller said.

"If we used our best clocks, with 17-digit precision, in global positioning satellites, we could determine position to the millimetre," he said. "But lifting a clock by one metre creates a change in the 16th digit. So, as we use better and better clocks, we need to know the influence of gravity better."

Muller also noted that the experiment demonstrates very clearly "Einstein's profound insight, that gravity is a manifestation of curved space and time, which is among the greatest discoveries of humankind."

This insight means that what we think of as the influence of gravity—planets orbiting stars, for example, or an apple falling to Earth—is really matter following the quickest path through spacetime. In a flat geometry, the quickest route is a straight line. But in Einstein's theory, the flow of time becomes a function of location, so the quickest path could now be an elliptical orbit or a plumb line to the ground.

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Samsung Hello, Mobile Simultaneously Projectors

Samsung has announced the MWC event, with a 2.1 as well as Android phone projector. Same as Wave Samsung handset, the Samsung i8520 Halo is also packaged with features 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi, GPS, DivX and XviD for video, 3.5mm headphone jack, 16GB of internal memory, 8-megapixel camera as well.

Hello Samsung i8520 is also equipped with 3.7-inch touchscreen display and the type AMOLED Android operating system, user interface is also a special projector. Hello Mobile Samsung i8520 also support DLNA, quad-band GSM / EDGE with tri-band UMTS 900 / 1900 / 2100.
Handset i8520 named or Halo will be released in Europe and Asia in the third quarter of this year 2010. Hello Samsung user interface is also similar to TouchWiz Android 3.0.

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Anniversary of Voyager's "pale blue dot" image of Earth

Twenty years ago on February 14, NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft had sailed beyond the outermost planet in our Solar System and turned its camera inward to snap a series of final images that would be its parting valentine to the string of planets it called home.

Mercury was too close to the Sun to see, Mars showed only a thin crescent of sunlight, and Pluto was too dim, but Voyager was able to capture cameos of Neptune, Uranus, Saturn, Jupiter, Earth and Venus from its unique vantage point.

These images, later arranged in a large-scale mosaic, make up the only family portrait of our planets arrayed about the Sun.

The Apollo missions in the 1960s and 70s had already altered our perspective of Earth by returning images of our home planet from the moon, but Voyager was providing a completely new perspective, said Ed Stone, Voyager project scientist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

"It captured the Earth as a speck of light in the vastness of the Solar System, which is our local neighbourhood in the Milky Way galaxy, in a universe replete with galaxies," Stone said.
Our home in space

In the years since the twin Voyager spacecraft were launched in 1977, they had already sent back breathtaking, groundbreaking pictures of the gas giants Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. It took Voyager 1 more than 12 years to reach the place where it took the group portrait, six billion kilometres away from the Sun. The imaging team started snapping images of the outer planets first because they were worried that pointing the camera near the Sun would blind it and prevent more picture-taking.

Candy Hansen, a planetary scientist based at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who worked with the Voyager imaging team at the time, remembers combing through the images and finally finding the image of Earth. She had seen so many pictures over the years that she could distinguish dust on the lens from the black dots imprinted on the lens for geometric correction.

There was our planet, a bright speck sitting in a kind of spotlight of sunlight scattered by the camera. Hansen still gets chills thinking about it.

"I was struck by how special Earth was, as I saw it shining in a ray of sunlight," she said. "It also made me think about how vulnerable our tiny planet is."
This was the image that inspired Carl Sagan, the Voyager imaging team member who had suggested taking this portrait, to call our home planet "a pale blue dot."

As he wrote in a book by that name, "That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. … There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world."
Voyagers still voyaging

After the images were taken, mission managers started powering down the cameras. The spacecraft weren't going to fly near anything else, and other instruments that were still collecting data needed power for the long journey to interstellar space that was ahead.

The Voyagers are still transmitting data daily back to Earth. Voyager 1 is now nearly 17 billion kilometres away from the Sun. The spacecraft have continued on to the next leg of their interstellar mission, closing in on the boundary of the bubble created by the Sun that envelops all the planets. Scientists eagerly await the time when the Voyagers will leave that bubble and enter interstellar space.

"We were marvelling at the vastness of space when this portrait was taken, but 20 years later, we're still inside the bubble," Stone said. "Voyager 1 may leave the solar bubble in five more years, but the family portrait gives you a sense of the scale of our neighbourhood and that there is a great deal beyond it yet to be discovered."

The Voyagers were built by JPL, which continues to operate both spacecraft. Caltech manages JPL for NASA.
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New Saturn images 'unique to science'

Researchers using the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) recently took advantage of the rare opportunity to record Saturn when its rings were edge-on, resulting in unique images of both of the giant planet's poles.

Saturn is only in this position every 15 years. This orientation allowed a sustained study of both of its beautiful and dynamic aurorae that decorate its poles, much like the northern and southern lights on our own planet.

It takes Saturn almost thirty years to orbit our Sun so chances to image both of its poles simultaneously are rare. Since 1994, Hubble has been snapping pictures of the planet at a good angle, but 2009 brought the unique opportunity for Hubble to image Saturn with rings edge-on. In addition, the ringed planet was approaching its equinox when both poles are equally illuminated by the Sun's rays.

These recent observations go well beyond just a still image and allowed researchers to monitor the behaviour of both Saturn's poles in the same shot over a sustained period of time and create a movie. Over several days during January and March 2009, Hubble collected data from the ringed planet that aided astronomers studying both its northern and southern swirling aurorae.

Given the rarity of such an event, this new footage will likely be the last and best equinox movie that Hubble captures of our planetary neighbour.
"It is particularly exciting to know that these images are unique to science," said Dr Jonathan Nichols from the University of Leicester. "They have not, and will never again, be obtained using Hubble."

"This is because HST pictured Saturn at a very special vantage point, near its equatorial plane. Due to Saturn's long orbit, HST will not see this view again in its lifetime."

"This sustained series images of simultaneous north-south aurora are important scientifically, since they cannot be obtained at any other planet, including Earth," Dr Nichols added. "They tell us a great deal about the nature of the planet's magnetic field and the processes which generate aurorae in a way not possible at Earth. It's a great example of how planetary science can fully complement the study of the Earth."
Celestial light show

The Sun constantly emits particles that reach all of the planets of the Solar System in the form of solar wind. When this electrically charged stream gets close to a planet, the planet's magnetic field traps the particles, bouncing them back and forth between its two poles. The magnetic field thus focuses the particles on the polar regions, where they interact with atoms in the upper layers of the atmosphere creating aurorae, the familiar glow that the inhabitants of the Earth's polar regions know as the northern and southern lights.

The light show of Saturn's aurorae appears symmetric at the two poles. However, analysing the new data in greater detail, astronomers discovered some subtle differences between the northern and southern aurorae, which reveal important information about Saturn's magnetic field.

The northern auroral oval is slightly smaller and more intense than the southern one, implying that Saturn's magnetic field is not equally distributed across the orb of the planet; it is slightly uneven and is stronger in the north than the south. As a result, the electrically charged particles in the north are accelerated to higher energies as they are fired toward the atmosphere than those in the south.

This confirms a previous result obtained by the space probe Cassini, which has been in orbit around the ringed planet since 2004.




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Motorola split So Two

Motorola Inc. will split in two?

Motorola said it would split the company in the first quarter of 2011, one focused on mobile phones and television, and the one in the field of enterprise networks. On Thursday (11/02) and then, Motorola said the split perusahaanya in 2 independent companies to help improve its position in different markets.

Motorola has lost quite a lot in mobile devices unit and is still trying to survive to compete with his new smartphone, but still did not explode since the Razr, even though the phone Droid has aroused little income since launched last year. The division of the two companies as well as weak economic impacts, while the wireless network equipment business has surged as consolidation among phone operators.

"We believe that the two independent companies will be opening a strategy and a golden opportunity to further grow. This movement will give effect to the tax-free stock of the division of two new companies later. Both new companies will use the Motorola brand, and for structural company will be announced later. "Said Greg Brown, CEO of Motorola.

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Nokia N8

Nokia will soon announce the presence of 14 'hero' new. One of them is the Nokia N8, which carried the smartphone Symbian OS 3 and equipped with 12 MP cameras.
Reported that the Finnish handset maker will not participate directly in the carpet Mobile World Congress which will take place in Barcelona.

This means that the ranks of the new Nokia phone will not shine in the arena. However, a special press conference will be held to introduce the 'whiz-whiz' that new.

It is estimated there are 14 mobile phones that will be introduced Nokia, one of whom was carrying the Nokia N8 the Symbian OS 3.

Quoted from Detiknet, Sunday (14.2.2010) Nokia N8 equipped with touch-screen 3.5-inch screen, 12 MP camera, able to capture 720p HD video, support DivX playback, HDMI output.

Nokia divided its products into several categories, namely, series C, series X for musical model, E for smartphones for professionals, N for upper-class smartphones, and S for a luxury model.

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Learning From the Nuclear Case of Iran

Iranian Ambassador to Indonesia, Behrooz Kamalvandi said that so far the western countries and the United States has launched a propaganda that is not fair and unilaterally against Iran over the nuclear issue. United States suspected that the purpose of Iran's uranium enrichment program will be used for weapons that would disrupt the peace and security internationally. Iran still says that its nuclear program is for generating electrical energy for peaceful purposes and for the welfare of the Iranian people.


Studies on Iran's nuclear program objectives and polemiknya, will be very beneficial for Indonesia to become food for thought related to nuclear power development plan. This is a discussion of the International Seminar on "Iran's Nuclear Program. What is it for, Indonesia Can Take A Lesson "at Hotel Mulia Senayan. Speakers at this seminar Ambassador of the Republic of Iran Mr. Behrooz Kamalvandi, Head of BATAN Dr. Jewish Hastowo, Dean Prof. FHUI. Dr. Hikmahanto Juwana, Researcher swallow Hersutanto CSIS Jakarta, SH, MA, and as a moderator Dr. Muhammad AS Hikam, as the keynote speech is KH. Abdurrahman Wahid or Gus Dur
According to Jewish Hastowo, in developing its nuclear program, Indonesia was not planning to make their own uranium enrichment. Then Jewish adding "If you want to have a uranium enrichment should create a regional group which Indonesia along with several other countries plan to make enrichment and operated jointly.

Gus Dur in his short speech to give an alternative nuclear power plant construction site on the island of Publications. According to nuclear development for electric energy is necessary, but development on the island of Java should be considered earthquake-prone conditions. Meanwhile, Prof.. Dr. Hikmahanto Juwana says: Iranian uranium enrichment to the attention of the UN Security Council and the United States under the George W. Bush. UN Security Council had twice given the resolution to Iran over Iran's refusal to halt its nuclear energy development. Learning from the case of Iran Indonesia should maintain good relations with the superpower countries to convince them that Indonesia's nuclear program for peaceful purposes.

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