A New Way to Explore Mars

MIT engineers and scientist colleagues have a new vision for the future of Mars exploration: a swarm of probes, each the size of a baseball, spreading out across the planet in every direction...........

Science Daily

Galaxies Cluster Near Dark Matter

Try mixing caramel into vanilla ice cream -- you will always end up with globs and swirls of caramel. Scientists are finding that galaxies may distribute themselves in similar ways throughout the universe and in places where there is lots of so-called dark matter..........


Science Daily

Solar System's New Tenth Planet a Little Larger Than Pluto

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has resolved the "tenth planet," nicknamed "Xena" for the first time, and has found that it is only just a little larger than Pluto..........

Science Daily

Earth Life Began on Mars?

..........A few scientists think there's evidence that humans actually descended from Martian microbes, not exactly what the author of Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus had in mind. But it merits further study, said chemist Steven Benner, who has founded a new institute in Gainesville, the Westheimer Institute for Science and Technology, which aims to bridge chemistry and biology, with evolution as its guide."If you really want to find a place to get life started, it's Mars, and if you want to get a place to get life to flourish, it's Earth," Benner said.While at the University of Florida a few years ago, Benner's team collaborated with scientists at The Scripps Research Institute to explore what kind of chemistry is necessary to support life..........

Unexplained Mysteries

Saturn May Have Millions of Mini-Moons

Now scientists have found the first evidence of millions of "missing link" moonlets—bigger than ring particles but small enough to fit inside a football stadium.
The international team found signs of four such moonlets in one small segment of Saturn's brightest ring, called the A ring, according to a report in this week's issue of the journal Nature............

National Geographic News

Proof of Big Bang

New NASA space-probe observations of the oldest light in the cosmos are the most direct evidence yet that the universe expanded extremely quickly immediately after the big bang, physicists say..........

National Geographic News

Huge Star Burst from the Dawn of Time

A gigantic star that lived fast and died young in a huge cosmic explosion soon after the dawn of time has been detected by astronomers looking back into the infancy of the universe.The cataclysmic event took place 12.8 billion years ago, just 900 million years after the Big Bang, and has provided scientists with their first opportunity to study an individual star that formed so far back in time..........

The Australian

Liquid Water Geysers Discovered on Saturn Moon

Scientists have found evidence that cold, Yellowstone-like geysers of water are issuing from a moon of Saturn called Enceladus, apparently fueled by liquid reservoirs that may lie just tens of yards beneath the moon's icy surface..........

MSNBC

Researchers Predict Powerful Sunspots

Solar researchers are predicting that the next cycle of sunspots, flares and magnetic storms from the sun will be the most powerful and active seen in nearly 50 years..........

Scripps Howard News

Largest Ever Galaxy Portrait

This new Hubble image reveals the gigantic Pinwheel galaxy, one of the best known examples of “grand design spirals”, and its supergiant star-forming regions in unprecedented detail. The image is the largest and most detailed photo of a spiral galaxy ever released from Hubble..........

Science Daily

Top Five Stars That May Support Life

Scientists already know that only a tiny fraction of the 200 to 400 billion stars in our galaxy seem to have what it takes to support life on orbiting planets. Now researchers think they know where such potential habitable stars—or "habstars"—hang in the sky. Margaret Turnbull, of the Carnegie Institution in Washington, D.C., recently released her list of top five potential habstars in our galaxy, three of which can be seen from Earth with the naked eye..........

National Geographic News

Galaxy Smashups Littered Early Universe

A study has found that the biggest galaxies in the universe formed through repeated, grand smashups early in the history of the universe..........

World Science

Astronomers Get Shortlist of Possible ET Addresses

Astronomers looking for extraterrestrial life now have a short list of places to point their telescopes.

They include nearby stars of the right size, age and composition to have Earth-like planets circling them, scientists said on Saturday.

But cuts in federal funding mean that private philanthropists who pay for the bulk of their work may find out first when and if extraterrestrial life is discovered, the astronomers told a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Margaret Turnbull of the Carnegie Institution of Washington released her "top 10" list of potential stars to the meeting. They will be the first targets of NASA's Terrestrial Planet Finder, a system of two orbiting observatories scheduled for launch by 2020..........

Topix.net

Scientists Studying Saturn Lightning Storm

Researchers are tracking a gigantic storm on Saturn that is unleashing lightning bolts more than 1,000 times stronger than those found on Earth.Using instruments aboard the international Cassini spacecraft, scientists from the University of Iowa first spotted the storm on Jan. 23..........

CBS News

Hints of Mega Solar Systems

NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has identified two huge "hypergiant" stars circled by monstrous disks of what might be planet-forming dust. The findings surprised astronomers because stars as big as these were thought to be inhospitable to planets..........

Science Daily

NASA Focuses on New Craft to Return to the Moon

NASA has delayed two programs that search for planets capable of supporting life as the space agency instead focuses on developing a new manned spacecraft to return to the moon in the next decade..........

AP Wire

Ongoing Galaxy Formation Detected

Astronomers have reported finding a huge blob of hot gas around a spiral galaxy, evidence that galaxies like our Milky Way are drawing in material from a gradual inflow of intergalactic gas..........

World Science

A Tenth Planet?

Scientists have measured the size of a solar system object discovered last year and confirmed that it is larger than Pluto.
The icy object, called 2003 UB313, is located in the far reaches of the solar system. It measures 1,900 miles (3,000 kilometers) in diameter. Pluto, by contrast, measures 1,400 miles (2,300 kilometers)..........

National Geographic News

Roving Mars: Almost Like Being There

If you live anywhere near an IMAX theater, it is well worth the trip to see the newly released Disney production, "Roving Mars". Made specially for the 6-story high IMAX screen and surround- sound experience, it is, as one would expect for an armchair interplanetary journey, a visually breathtaking adventure. Apart from the visuals, interspersed with real still photos snapped by the mars rovers "Spirit" and "Opportunity", even more impressive is the up close and personal emotional triumph of the engineering undertaking itself, highlighted most effectively with portrayals of the elation felt by the staff of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory as that history-making "first signal" emerged from the nerve-racking silence of the control center when "Spirit" touched down intact. After a string of disappointments (two thirds of all Mars ventures ended in failure), it had to be sweat. "Roving Mars" is playing in most IMAX theaters everywhere.

Planet Pluto: Within Our Reach

"Space travel" has a deeper meaning these days. Celebrities and businessmen are dishing out their millions for a trip to space, while mention of space travel agencies and even talk of tourist trips going around the moon starting in 2008 seem to be the wave of the future. But on the other side of the spectrum, scientists at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) are looking farther into space -- not to the Earth's moon, but to Pluto and its largest moon, Charon.

While a trip to our moon takes a few days depending upon the spacecraft, the four-billion-mile journey to reach the ninth planet and its moon will take a total of 10 years.

The New Horizons spacecraft, which is the first mission of NASA's New Frontiers program to explore other planets, was launched Jan. 19 at 2 p.m. EST. The spacecraft is controlled by the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland.

Aerospace Engineering Prof. Jim Andary is the Chief System Engineer for the Missions System Engineering Branch at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland.

"The New Horizons spacecraft was the fastest spacecraft to leave the earth ... it set a record," Andary said."It went past the moon in nine hours."..........

The Cavalier Daily