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Dark streaks on sun-warmed slopes hint at unexpected dampness in the Martian tropics. If confirmed, the discovery would mean that water on Mars is more widespread than imagined – possibly adding a wrinkle to efforts to protect Mars from contamination with earthly life forms.
Previous images taken from orbit showed similar streaks that appear to be moving down slopes in the planet's southern mid-latitudes. These dark spots appeared in sunny areas in late spring and summer then faded away, leading scientists to conclude that briny ice under the surface was melting, and that liquid water was seeping up and evaporating.
Water may be spouting from Jupiter's icy moon Europa - considered one of the best places to find alien life in the Solar System.
Images by the Hubble Space Telescope show surpluses of hydrogen and oxygen in the moon's southern hemisphere, say astronomers writing in Science journal.
If confirmed as water vapour plumes, it raises hopes that Europa's underground ocean can be accessed from its surface.
Future missions could probe these seas for signs of life.
Nasa's planetary science chief Dr James Green told BBC News: "The presence of the water has led scientists to speculate that the Europa we know today harbours life.
(Phys.org) —NASA's Cassini spacecraft is providing scientists with key clues about Saturn's moon Titan, and in particular, its hydrocarbon lakes and seas.
Titan is one of the most Earth-like places in the solar system, and the only place other than our planet that has stable liquid on its surface.
Cassini's recent close flybys are bringing into sharper focus a region in Titan's northern hemisphere that sparkles with almost all of the moon's seas and lakes. Scientists working with the spacecraft's radar instrument have put together the most detailed multi-image mosaic of that region to date. The image includes all the seas and most of the major lakes. Some of the flybys tracked over areas that previously were seen at a different angle, so researchers have been able to create a flyover of the area around Titan's largest and second largest seas, known as Kraken Mare and Ligeia Mare, respectively, and some of the nearby lakes.
A creative application of a method previously used to analyze data at Mars also revealed that Ligeia Mare is about 560 feet (170 meters) deep. This is the first time scientists have been able to plumb the bottom of a lake or sea on Titan. This was possible partly because the liquid turned out to be very pure, allowing the radar signal to pass through it easily. The liquid surface may be as smooth as the paint on our cars, and it is very clear to radar eyes.
The new results indicate the liquid is mostly methane, somewhat similar to a liquid form of natural gas on Earth.
"Ligeia Mare turned out to be just the right depth for radar to detect a signal back from the sea floor, which is a signal we didn't think we'd be able to get," said Marco Mastrogiuseppe, a Cassini radar team associate at Sapienza University of Rome. "The measurement we made shows Ligeia to be deeper in at least one place than the average depth of Lake Michigan."
One implication is that Cassini scientists now can estimate the total volume of the liquids on Titan. Based on Mastrogiuseppe's work, calculations made by Alexander Hayes, of Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., show there are about 2,000 cubic miles (9,000 cubic kilometers) of liquid hydrocarbon, about 40 times more than in all the proven oil reservoirs on Earth.
In the meantime, its radar passes will continue to fill in gaps in the scientists' surface map. One key flyover next year will allow the probe to take similar bathymetric measurements at Kraken.
"Kraken's area is four to five times the size Ligeia, so if it has a similar depth profile you would expect it to have about 200 times the proven oil reserves on Earth," said Alex Hayes from Cornell University.
"By way of comparison, the estimate for the volume of Ligeia is twice that of Lake Michigan. And for all the [seas on Titan], it is 15 times the volume of Lake Michigan."
China says it has successfully landed a craft carrying a robotic rover on the surface of the Moon, the first soft landing there for 37 years.
On Saturday afternoon (GMT), a landing module used thrusters to touch down, marking the latest step in China's ambitious space exploration programme.
Several hours later, the lander will deploy a robotic rover called Yutu, which translates as "Jade Rabbit".
The touchdown took place on a flat plain called Sinus Iridum.
The Chang'e-3 mission launched atop a Chinese-developed Long March 3B rocket on 1 December from Xichang in the country's south.
Iran said on Saturday that it had safely returned a monkey to Earth after blasting it into space in the second such launch this year in its controversial ballistic programme.
President Hassan Rouhani congratulated the scientists involved in the mission, in a message carried by the official IRNA news agency.
The report added that the rocket reached a height of 120 kilometres (75 miles).
In January, Iran said it had successfully brought a live monkey, which it named Pishgam (Pioneer), back to Earth from orbit.
But the experiment's success was disputed, when a different monkey was presented to the media after the landing.
An earlier attempt had failed in September 2011.
Untethered and, more importantly, not exploding this time around, NASA's Morpheus lander roared into life and climbed 15 metres above a launch pad at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Tuesday.
Designed to be a test bed for future lunar, asteroid and planetary cargo lander designs, the liquid oxygen and methane-powered spacecraft then hovered and nudged itself sideways before landing 7.5 metres from where it took off – missing a target by just 15 centimetres.
This success is a far cry from 9 August 2012, when an earlier model crashed and burned on its first free flight test. That fate can be a regular problem for such landers: back in 1968 Neil ArmstrongMovie Camera narrowly escaped death when his lunar module test bed went similarly awry. He ejected just in time.
BEIJING -- China said Monday it was on track to launch a fifth lunar probe with the aim of bringing back lunar soil and rock samples following the successful moon landing of a space probe.
The new mission planned for 2017 would mark the third and final phase of China's robotic lunar exploration program and pave the way for possibly landing an astronaut on the moon after 2020.
(WATCH: Evidence of Alien Life?)
On Saturday, Chang'e 3 set down on the moon, marking the first soft landing of a space probe on the lunar surface in 37 years. The landing vehicle will conduct scientific research for a year and its accompanying rover will survey the moon's structure and probe for natural resources.
Pandora and Endor, eat your hearts out. The first known moon outside of our solar system may have been found, and it seems weirder than we ever could have imagined.
Exomoons have long been predicted to exist – some may even be habitable worlds – but until now, no one had detected any. "This is the first serious candidate from any survey that I am aware of," says astronomer David Kipping of Harvard University, who was not involved in the discovery.
Unlike the exomoons that feature in the films Avatar and Return of the Jedi, not to mention the moons in our solar system, the new moon and its exoplanet seem to be adrift in the cosmos, far from any star.
The two new objects were detected using an unusual method. Most of the 1000 or so exoplanets discovered to date were found by analysing changes in the light of their star, but a select few have been seen using a technique called gravitational microlensing. When an object passes in front of a distant star as seen from Earth, the object's gravity bends the light from the background star, focusing it like a lens – and making the star temporarily appear brighter if observed from a particular angle.
Europe is about to launch the Gaia satellite - one of the most ambitious space missions in history.
The 740m-euro (£620m) observatory is going to map the precise positions and distances to more than a billion stars.
This should give us the first realistic picture of how our Milky Way galaxy is constructed.
Gaia's remarkable sensitivity will lead also to the detection of many thousands of previously unseen objects, including new planets and asteroids.
The European Space Agency (ESA) on Thursday launched an advanced telescope designed to detect a billion stars and provide the most detailed map yet of the Milky Way.
The Gaia telescope was successfully hoisted by a Soyuz-STB-Fregat rocket from ESA's space base in Kourou, French Guiana, the agency reported in a webcast.
"All is fonctioning normally," an ESA commentator said.
The satellite was to be deployed 42 minutes after launch.
The 740-million-euro ($1.02-billion) device, the most sophisticated space telescope ever built by Europe, aims at building an "astronomical census" of a billion stars, or around one percent of all the stars in the Milky Way.
By repeating the observations as many as 70 times throughout its mission, Gaia can help astronomers calculate the distance, speed, direction and motion of these stars and build a 3-D map of our section of the galaxy.
It will also help in the search for planets beyond our Solar System—as many as many as 50,000 so-called extrasolar planets could be spotted during the satellite's five-year life, astronomers hope.
Gaia will also observe the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter to help the search for any rocks that may one day threaten Earth, and keep a watch for exploding stars, called supernovae, which are rarely observed in real time.
Gaia 'billion star surveyor' set for launch
Europe is about to launch the Gaia satellite - one of the most ambitious space missions in history.
The 740m-euro (£620m) observatory is going to map the precise positions and distances to more than a billion stars.
This should give us the first realistic picture of how our Milky Way galaxy is constructed.
Gaia's remarkable sensitivity will lead also to the detection of many thousands of previously unseen objects, including new planets and asteroids.
BBC News - Gaia 'billion star surveyor' set for launch
To date, scientists have confirmed the existence of more than 900 exoplanets circulating outside our solar system. To determine if any of these far-off worlds are habitable requires knowing an exoplanet's mass—which can help tell scientists whether the planet is made of gas or rock and other life-supporting materials.
But current techniques for estimating exoplanetary mass are limited. Radial velocity is the main method scientists use: tiny wobbles in a star's orbit as it is tugged around by the planet's gravitational force, from which scientists can derive the planet-to-star mass ratio. For very large, Neptune-sized planets, or smaller Earth-sized planets orbiting very close to bright stars, radial velocity works relatively well. But the technique is less successful with smaller planets that orbit much farther from their stars, as Earth does.
Now scientists at MIT have developed a new technique for determining the mass of exoplanets, using only their transit signal—dips in light as a planet passes in front of its star. This data has traditionally been used to determine a planet's size and atmospheric properties, but the MIT team has found a way to interpret it such that it also reveals the planet's mass.
WASHINGTON – The Mars One colonization project plans to bring live video of the surface of Mars to Earth via a privately built communications satellite and lander to launch as part of an unmanned mission to the Red Planet in 2018.
"When we land on Mars, we will have the most unique video footage in the solar system," Mars One co-founder and CEO Bas Lansdorp said in a news conference on Dec. 10. "Anyone with Internet access will be able to see what the weather's like on Mars."
Lansdorp said public engagement is a driving force for Mars One, which aims to land humans on the Red Planet by 2025. The Netherlands-based nonprofit has said it plans to finance the settlement mission in part through a reality TV show, for which a live video feed will be crucial.
Six out of the eight pieces of scientific equipment deployed to the moon with the Chang’e-3 lunar mission have been activated by scientists and are functioning properly, according to those working on the mission.
Speaking at a news conference on Tuesday, scientists said the Yutu lunar rover and the Chang’e-3 lander have functioned as planned.
Su Yan, deputy designer of the Chang’e-3 ground applications system stated that, ”Except for the alpha particle X-ray spectrometer and the visible and near-infrared imaging spectrometer, the instruments have all been activated and are undergoing tests and adjustments,”
Zhang He, deputy designer of the probe, said that all the equipment on the moon is in “perfect” condition, and optical and ultraviolet-imaging experiments are under way.
Scientists with the ground applications system are expecting to receive a gigantic quantity of original data from the rover and lander. Each with their own independent channels to send signals, Su said.
Wu Weiren, chief designer of China’s lunar probe program said, ”We made more than 200 plans to respond to any possible emergencies, and they cover each step of the mission,” he said. “I am proud that we haven’t needed to use them so far.”
China became the third nation in the world, after the United States and the former Soviet Union, to soft-land a probe on the moon when the Chang’e-3 rover successfully set down.
It has only been within the last 20 years that we’ve discovered planets outside of our solar system, although astronomers have always believed they exist. Now, though, new exoplanets are discovered every day, including some that may even be habitable. Thanks to NASA’s Kepler mission, we have detected more than 3,500 potential exoplanet candidates. In fresh news: a team of astronomers at the European Southern Observatory may have discovered the most exciting — and closest — exoplanet yet.
This new potential exoplanet exists within a system of two brown dwarf stars, named Luhman 16AB. This system, which is only 6.6 light years away from Earth, was first discovered last year when astronomers looked over data from NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) spacecraft. Luhman 16AB is so close, in fact, that television transmissions of Dexter are now getting there (Dexter premiered in 2006). By studying orbital cycles, astronomers determined that the mass of these brown dwarfs is about 40 times that of Jupiter.
Weather forecasters on exoplanet GJ 1214b would have an easy job. Today's forecast: cloudy. Tomorrow: overcast. Extended outlook: more clouds.
A team of scientists led by researchers in the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of Chicago report they have definitively characterized the atmosphere of a super-Earth class planet orbiting another star for the first time.
The scrutinized planet, which is known as GJ1214b, is classified as a super-Earth type planet because its mass is intermediate between those of Earth and Neptune. Recent searches for planets around other stars ("exoplanets") have shown that super-Earths like GJ 1214b are among the most common type of planets in the Milky Way galaxy. Because no such planets exist in our Solar System, the
