Fresh Water Once Flowed in Ancient Mars Lake
NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory – Curiosity Rover – was sent to Mars some 16 months ago with a major objective of finding evidence of a past environment that would be well suited to supporting microbial life. Today, a team of mission researchers, writing in a series of papers published in the journal Science, said that […]
Volunteers, Home Computers Help Identify Gamma Ray Pulsars
A network of 40,000 volunteer researchers, along with 200,000 personal computers worldwide, has helped scientists from the Max Planck Institutes for Gravitational Physics and Radio Astronomy – the Albert Einstein Institute (AEI) discover four gamma-ray pulsars. Pulsars are compact and rapidly rotating neutron stars which are the remains of stars that have exploded. The discoveries […]
US, India Prep for Unmanned Missions to Mars
Both the United States and India are gearing up for unmanned missions to Mars. India will launch its first interplanetary spacecraft when the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) sends its Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM) to the Red Planet on Nov. 5. The spacecraft will be launched from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre located in Sriharikota, […]
First Evidence of Comet Strike Found
A team of South African scientists writing in the journal ‘Earth and Planetary Science Letters’ said that they have found the first evidence of a comet striking Earth 28 million years ago. “Comets always visit our skies – they’re these dirty snowballs of ice mixed with dust – but never before in history has material […]
Curiosity Rover Finds Water on Mars
The first scoop of Martian soil analyzed by Curiosity Rover’s built-in laboratory has revealed a high amount of water in the soil, according to NASA. “One of the most exciting results from this very first solid sample ingested by Curiosity is the high percentage of water in the soil,” said Curiosity researcher Laurie Leshin, of […]
Scientists Learn More about Mysterious 3rd Van Allen Belt
New research provides insight into the mysterious Van Allen radiation belts. There are normally two of these giant bands of high-energy radiation encircling the Earth. However, researchers discovered a third and previously unknown radiation ring that only lasted for about a month back in September 2012. Writing in a recent edition of Nature Physics, scientists from UCLA […]
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Scientists See Processes Behind Major Solar Events
Over the past several years, NASA spacecraft studying the sun have sent back some spectacular images of it exploding with solar flares and coronal mass ejections. Now, scientists say that two of these spacecraft — the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) and the Reuven Ramaty High Energy Solar Spectroscopic Imager (RHESSI) — have detected a phenomenon […]
IRIS: New NASA Spacecraft to Study Mysterious Region of Sun’s Atmosphere
Did you know that the Sun’s outer atmosphere, or corona, is much hotter than its surface? Scientists have been quite curious about a mysterious interface region of the Sun’s atmosphere that amplifies energy from about 5,800 degrees Kelvin on the surface, or photosphere, to around 1,000,000 degrees Kelvin in the corona. With Thursday’s launch of […]