Evidence of water ice clouds found outside solar system

Credit: A. Fujii

A team of scientists led by Carnegie's Jacqueline Faherty has discovered the first evidence of water ice clouds on an object outside of our own Solar System.

Water ice clouds exist on our own gas giant planets, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, but have not been seen outside of the planets orbiting our Sun until now.

Their findings are published by The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

At the Las Campanas Observatory in Chile, Faherty, along with a team including Carnegie's Andrew Monson, used the FourStar near infrared camera to detect the coldest brown dwarf ever characterised.

Their findings are the result of 151 images taken over three nights and combined.

The object, named WISE J085510.83-071442.5, or W0855, was first seen by NASA's Wide-Field Infrared Explorer mission and published earlier this year. But it was not known if it could be detected by Earth-based facilities.

"This was a battle at the telescope to get the detection," said Faherty.

Chris Tinney, an Astronomer at the Australian Centre for Astrobiology, UNSW Australia and co-author on the result stated: "This is a great result. This object is so faint and it's exciting to be the first people to detect it with a telescope on the ground."

Brown dwarfs aren't quite very small stars, but they aren't quite giant planets either.

They are too small to sustain the hydrogen fusion process that fuels stars.

Their temperatures can range from nearly as hot as a star to as cool as a planet, and their masses also range between star-like and giant planet-like.

They are of particular interest to scientists because they offer clues to star-formation processes. They also overlap with the temperatures of planets, but are much easier to study since they are commonly found in isolation.


A team of scientists led by Carnegie's Jacqueline Faherty has discovered the first evidence of water ice clouds on an object outside of our own Solar System. 

Water ice clouds exist on our own gas giant planets, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, but have not been seen outside of the planets orbiting our Sun until now.

Their findings are published by The Astrophysical Journal Letters. 

Credit: Produced and directed by Brian Patrick Abbott. Written by Jacqueline K. Faherty

W0855 is the fourth-closest system to our own Sun, practically a next-door neighbour in astronomical distances.

A comparison of the team's near-infrared images of W0855 with models for predicting the atmospheric content of brown dwarfs showed evidence of frozen clouds of sulphide and water.

"Ice clouds are predicted to be very important in the atmospheres of planets beyond our Solar System, but they've never been observed outside of it before now," Faherty said.

Russia's Space Geckos Found Dead After Landing

Russia's Foton M4 satellite landed back on Earth on Sept. 1, 2014 after a 1.5-month trip into space to study the mating habits of geckos and other experiments. The geckos did not survive.

Credit: Roscosmos

A group of geckos sent to space so that scientists could study the mating habits of lizards in weightlessness have died.

Scientist discovered that the small reptiles didn't survive their outer space trek after the Russian satellite housing them landed back on Earth this weekend.

Researchers still aren't sure when or how the intrepid space geckos died, according to a statement released by Roscosmos, Russia's space agency, on Monday (Sept. 1).

Although the five geckos didn't survive the trip, the Foton spacecraft kept a group of flies alive for the duration of the 1.5-month space journey.

One of the geckos blasted into space onboard the Foton M4 satellite.

Credit: Roscosmos

"After extraction of biological objects from the lander to carry out the initial evaluation, it was found that the fly Drosophila moved spaceflight well, successfully developed and bred," according to a translated version of the Roscosmos statement.

The Foton carrying the geckos, and other experiments, launched to space on July 18. Shortly after the satellite made it to orbit, officials found that the craft wasn't responding to commands from the ground. Mission controllers re-established contact with the animal-filled spacecraft a few days after losing touch with it.

The interior of the Foton M4 spacecraft back on Earth. 

The satellite housed a group of five geckos that died at some point during the space trip. 

Credit: Roscosmos

The geckos got a lot of attention during their time in orbit. Comedian John Oliver even launched a "#GoGetThoseGeckos" campaign on his show "Last Week Tonight" to stage a rescue for the lizards.

"Star Trek's" Sir Patrick Stewart, Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin and other famous stars lent their support to the mock campaign as well.

"Maybe, just maybe, if we could come together and accomplish one thing as a civilization, we could then build on that progress," Oliver said during a broadcast in July.

"And I think rescuing these space sex geckos might just be that thing. And that is why, I'm issuing a challenge to humanity: Go get those geckos."

This wasn't the first experiment launched to study animal sex in space. Scientists have sent frogs, mice and salamanders into orbit to learn more about sex in weightlessness. In 1994, Japanese killifish became the first vertebrates to reproduce in outer space.

Russian cosmonauts have found sea plankton on outside of ISS

The International Space Station is featured in this image photographed by an STS-132 crew member on board the Space Shuttle Atlantis after the station and shuttle began their post-undocking relative separation. 

Credit: NASA/Crew of STS-132

The Russian news agency ITAR-TASS is claiming that Russian officials have confirmed that Russian cosmonauts have found sea plankton on the outside of the International Space Station.

The news agency reports that the cosmonauts have also found traces of other organisms on the outside of the station as well.

To date, no other news group has been able to confirm the report and thus far it appears no other agency, including NASA has been able to confirm the claims made by the Russians.

Finding sea plankton on the outside of the ISS would be remarkable, as the outside of the station is of course exposed to space, a hostile environment, to say the least.

NASA officials reported that they were aware that Russian cosmonauts were conducting experiments on the exterior of the space station (primarily on windows known as illuminators), but were unaware of what they entailed.

They note that cosmonauts have conducted such experiments as recently as this past week. The same officials report that they have not heard the results of any findings regarding the experiments from the Russian scientists directly, and thus, cannot comment on what the Russians are claiming.

One scientist with NASA, Lynn Rothschild, suggested that if the claims turn out to be true, the plankton likely made its way to the ISS aboard a space station module.

Reports of the sea plankton findings have come, ITAR-TASS reports, from Vladimir Solovyev, chief of the Russian ISS orbital mission, he's also reporting that the type of plankton found is not native to the parts of Russia where spacecraft are launched, he theorizes that air currents could have pushed the plankton to the station (plankton is known to make its way into the atmosphere).

The findings, he continues, confirm that organisms can live on the outer surface of the space station, something Russian scientists have apparently been studying for over a year, though he didn't actually come right out and say that the specimens found were still alive.

He also reports that the outside of the space station is covered with material from spacecraft engines that is emitted as they come and go. Of concern are the illuminators, which now need to be polished.

NASA MRO: Mars weather camera finds new crater

The new Mars crater spans half the length of a football field in this photo from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter’s sharpest-sighted camera, the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment. 

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona

Researchers have discovered on the Red Planet the largest fresh meteor-impact crater ever firmly documented with before-and-after images.

The images were captured by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).

The crater spans half the length of a football field and first appeared in March 2012. The impact that created it likely was preceded by an explosion in the Martian sky caused by intense friction between an incoming asteroid and the planet's atmosphere.

This series of events can be likened to the meteor blast that shattered windows in Chelyabinsk, Russia, last year.

The air burst and ground impact darkened an area of the Martian surface about 5 miles (8 kilometers) across.

The darkened spot appears in images taken by the orbiter's weather-monitoring camera, the Mars Colour Imager (MARCI).

Since the orbiter began its systematic observation of Mars in 2006, scientist Bruce Cantor has examined MARCI's daily global coverage, looking for evidence of dust storms and other observable weather events in the images.

Cantor is this camera's deputy principal investigator at Malin Space Science Systems, the San Diego company that built and operates MARCI and the orbiter's telescopic Context Camera (CTX).

Through his careful review of the images, he helps operators of NASA's solar-powered Mars rover, Opportunity, plan for weather events that may diminish the rover's energy. He also posts weekly Mars weather reports.

About two months ago, Cantor noticed an inconspicuous dark dot near the equator in one of the images.

"It wasn't what I was looking for," Cantor said. "I was doing my usual weather monitoring and something caught my eye. It looked usual, with rays emanating from a central spot."


Scientists using NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter found a fresh meteor-impact crater, and by golly it's big. It's the largest ever located anywhere by using before-and-after pictures.

He began examining earlier images, skipping back a month or more at a time. The images revealed that the dark spot was present a year ago, but not five years ago.

He homed in further, checking images from about 40 different dates, and pinned down the date the impact event occurred; the spot was not there up through March 27, 2012, and then appeared before the daily imaging on March 28, 2012.

Once the dark spot was verified as new, it was targeted last month by CTX and the orbiter's sharpest-sighted camera, the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE).

Of the approximately 400 fresh crater-causing impacts on Mars that have been documented with before-and-after images, this is the only one discovered using a MARCI image, rather than an image from a higher-resolution camera.

More information: Images of the site from MARCI and from the two telescopic cameras on MRO are at: go.usa.gov/8KgJ

Asteroid Chariklo found to have two rings

Observations at many sites in South America, including ESO's La Silla Observatory, have made the surprise discovery that the remote asteroid Chariklo is surrounded by two dense and narrow rings. 

This is the smallest object by far found to have rings and only the fifth body in the Solar System, after the much larger planets Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, to have this feature. 

The origin of these rings remains a mystery, but they may be the result of a collision that created a disc of debris. 

This artist's impression shows how the rings might look from close to the surface of Chariklo. 

Credit: ESO /L. Calçada /Nick Risinger (skysurvey.org)


Observations at many sites in South America have made the discovery that the asteroid Chariklo is surrounded by two dense and narrow rings.

This is the smallest object by far found to have rings and only the fifth body in the Solar System to have this feature.

The origin of these rings remains a mystery, but they may be the result of a collision that created a disc of debris.

The rings of Saturn are one of the most spectacular sights in the sky, and less prominent rings have also been found around the other giant planets.

Despite many careful searches, no rings had been found around smaller objects orbiting the Sun in the Solar System.

Now observations of the distant minor planet (10199) Chariklo as it passed in front of a star have shown that this object too is surrounded by two fine rings.

"We weren't looking for a ring and didn't think small bodies like Chariklo had them at all, so the discovery, and the amazing amountof detail we saw in the system, came as a complete surprise!" says Felipe Braga-Ribas (Observatório Nacional/MCTI, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil) who planned the observation campaign and is lead author on the new paper.

Chariklo is the largest member of a class known as the Centaurs and it orbits between Saturn and Uranus in the outer Solar System.

Predictions had shown that it would pass in front of the star UCAC4 248-108672 on 3 June 2013, as seen from South America.

Astronomers using telescopes at seven different locations, including the 1.54-metre Danish and TRAPPIST telescopes at ESO's La Silla Observatory in Chile, were able to watch the star apparently vanish for a few seconds as its light was blocked by Chariklo—an occultation.

Chariklo is a comet-like miniature planet located between Saturn and Uranus. 

It has a diameter of 250 km and new observations show that there are two rings of ice particles and pebbles. 

This is the first time such a small celestial body with rings has been observed. 

Credit: Lucie Maquet

But they found much more than they were expecting. A few seconds before, and again a few seconds after the main occultation there were two further very short dips in the star's apparent brightness.

Something around Chariklo was blocking the light! By comparing what was seen from different sites the team could reconstruct not only the shape and size of the object itself but also the shape, width, orientation and other properties of the newly discovered rings.

The team found that the ring system consists of two sharply confined rings only seven and three kilometres wide, separated by a clear gap of nine kilometres—around a small 250-kilometre diameter object orbiting beyond Saturn.

"For me, it was quite amazing to realise that we were able not only to detect a ring system, but also pinpoint that it consists of two clearly distinct rings," adds Uffe Gråe Jørgensen (Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen, Denmark), one of the team.

"I try to imagine how it would be to stand on the surface of this icy object, small enough that a fast sports car could reach escape velocity and drive off into space, and stare up at a 20-kilometre wide ring system 1000 times closer than the Moon."

The special camera is Irish, and the software programs were specially developed over five years at the Niels Bohr Institute by three astronomers and two Ph.D. students. 

It takes 40 images per second and the resolution is just as fantastic as if it was out in space. 

It is now sitting on the Danish telescope at the La Silla Observatory in Chile. 

The main purpose of the camera is to observe exoplanets, which are planets orbiting a star other than the Sun, but the sensitive camera has also shown its strength for making extremely precise observations of other objects. 

Credit: Jesper Skottfelt, Niels Bohr Institute

Although many questions remain unanswered, astronomers think that this sort of ring is likely to be formed from debris left over after a collision. It must be confined into the two narrow rings by the presence of small putative satellites.

"So, as well as the rings, it's likely that Chariklo has at least one small moon still waiting to be discovered," adds Felipe Braga Ribas.

The rings may prove to be a phenomenon that might in turn later lead to the formation of a small moon. Such a sequence of events, on a much larger scale, may explain the birth of our own Moon in the early days of the Solar System, as well as the origin of many other satellites around planets and asteroids.

The leaders of this project are provisionally calling the rings by the nicknames Oiapoque and Chuí, two rivers near the northern and southern extremes of Brazil.

More information: Paper: dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature13155

SETI Prediction: Intelligent Alien Life Could Be Found by 2040

This exoplanet orbits the star Gliese 667 C, which belongs to a triple system. 

The six Earth-mass exoplanet circulates around its low-mass host star at a distance equal to only 1/20th of the Earth-Sun distance. 

The host star is a companion to two other low-mass stars, which are seen here in the distance. 

Credit: ESO

The first detection of intelligent extraterrestrial life will likely come within the next quarter-century, a prominent alien hunter predicts.

By 2040 or so, astronomers will have scanned enough star systems to give themselves a great shot of discovering alien-produced electromagnetic signals, said Seth Shostak of the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute in Mountain View, Calif.

"I think we'll find E.T. within two dozen years using these sorts of experiments," Shostak said here Thursday (Feb. 6) during a talk at the 2014 NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) symposium at Stanford University.

"Instead of looking at a few thousand star systems, which is the tally so far, we will have looked at maybe a million star systems" 24 years from now, Shostak said. "A million might be the right number to find something."



Many potentially habitable worlds
Shostak's optimism is based partly on observations by NASA's planet-hunting Kepler space telescope, which has shown that the Milky Way galaxy likely teems with worlds capable of supporting life as we know it.

"The bottom line is, like one in five stars has at least one planet where life might spring up," Shostak said. "That's a fantastically large percentage. That means in our galaxy, there's on the order of tens of billions of Earth-like worlds."

Shostak and his colleagues think at least some of these worlds host intelligent aliens — beings that have developed the capability to send electromagnetic signals out into the cosmos, as human civilization does every second of every day.

So they're pointing big radio dishes toward the heavens, hoping to detect something produced by living beings.

NASA ESA Hubble: Elusive Dark Matter Found?

This Hubble Space Telescope composite image shows a ghostly "ring" of dark matter in the galaxy cluster Cl 0024+17. 

Credit: NASA, ESA, M.J. Jee and H. Ford (Johns Hopkins University)

The mysterious dark matter that makes up most of the matter in the universe may already have been detected with superconducting circuits, researchers say.

Dark matter is currently one of the greatest mysteries in the cosmos — an invisible substance thought to make up five-sixths of all matter in the universe.

The scientific consensus right now is that dark matter is composed of a new type of particle, one that interacts very weakly at best with all the known forces of the universe, except gravity.

As such, dark matter is invisible and nearly completely intangible, mostly only detectable via the gravitational pull it exerts.

A number of ongoing experiments based on massive sensor arrays buried underground are attempting to identify the weak signals dark matter is expected to give off when it experiences a rare collision with other particles. So far, none of these studies have detected any dark matter fingerprints.

Now, theoretical physicist Christian Beck at Queen Mary University of London suggests much smaller benchtop detectors might be capable of detecting axions, which are leading theoretical candidates for dark matter particles.

Recent theoretical research suggests axions may condense together, essentially forming super-particles that physicists call Bose-Einstein condensates.

"I started thinking not about the behaviour of single axions, but [about] the collective behaviour of many axions coupled together," Beck said.



Beck noted the equations describing the motion of these axions were very similar to those governing a special kind of circuit known as an S/N/S Josephson junction, a device made of two superconductors separated by a thin layer of metal.

Beck calculated that axions could leave behind a detectable electrical signal when they pass through these devices. "This opens up a new way of searching for axions that people haven't thought about before," he said.

Bose-Einstein condensates

If this notion is true, Beck said that the evidence may already have appeared — in a 2004 experiment exploring noise levels in S/N/S Josephson junctions that revealed a signal of unknown origin.

If that signal came from an axion, Beck calculated, it would mean these particles have masses less than four-billionths those of electrons.

To confirm or refute the idea that axions generated the 2004 signal, further experiments are needed, ones paying special focus to shielding from any external radiation, since axions cannot be shielded against.

In addition, the Earth is expected to move faster through the galaxy's halo of dark matter in June and slower in December, so if the signals come from axions, the number of such signals these devices detect should rise and fall over the year.

"I want to now collaborate with my experimental colleagues to do the tests I suggested," Beck said.

Beck is scheduled to detail his findings online Dec. 2 in the journal Physical Review Letters.

NASA Mars Curiosity Rover: 2% Water found in surface soil

Future Mars explorers may be able to get all the water they need out of the red dirt beneath their boots, a new study suggests.

NASA's Mars rover Curiosity has found that surface soil on the Red Planet contains about 2 percent water by weight.

That means astronaut pioneers could extract roughly 2 pints (1 liter) of water out of every cubic foot (0.03 cubic meters) of Martian dirt they dig up, said study lead author Laurie Leshin, of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y.

"For me, that was a big 'wow' moment," Leshin told reporters. "I was really happy when we saw that there's easily accessible water here in the dirt beneath your feet. And it's probably true anywhere you go on Mars."

The new study is one of five papers published in the journal Science today (Sept. 26) that report what researchers have learned about Martian surface materials from the work did during its first 100 days on the Red Planet.



Soaking up atmospheric water
Curiosity touched down inside Mars' huge Gale Crater in August 2012, kicking off a planned two-year surface mission to determine if the Red Planet could ever have supported microbial life.

It achieved that goal in March, when it found that a spot near its landing site called Yellowknife Bay was indeed habitable billions of years ago.

Laurie Leshin

But Curiosity did quite a bit of science work before getting to Yellowknife Bay. Leshin and her colleagues looked at the results of Curiosity's first extensive Mars soil analyses, which the 1-ton rover performed on dirt that it scooped up at a sandy site called Rocknest in November 2012.

Using its Sample Analysis at Mars instrument (SAM), Curiosity heated this dirt to a temperature of 1,535 degrees Fahrenheit (835 degrees Celsius), and then identified the gases that boiled off.

SAM saw significant amounts of carbon dioxide, oxygen and sulfur compounds — and lots of water on Mars.

Sample Analysis at Mars instrument (SAM)

SAM also determined that the soil water is rich in deuterium, a "heavy" isotope of hydrogen that contains one neutron and one proton (as opposed to "normal" hydrogen atoms, which have no neutrons).

The water in Mars' thin air sports a similar deuterium ratio, Leshin said.

"That tells us that the dirt is acting like a bit of a sponge and absorbing water from the atmosphere," she said.

Algorithm finds missing phytoplankton in Southern Ocean

This still image is showing the concentrations of phytoplankton observed by satellites in the Southern Ocean. Credit: Robert Johnson 

NASA satellites may have missed more than 50% of the phytoplankton in the Southern Ocean, making it far more difficult to estimate the carbon capture potential of this vast area of sea.

But now, new research published in the Journal of Geophysical Research, Three improved satellite chlorophyll algorithms for the Southern Ocean, has led to the development of an algorithm that produces substantially more accurate estimates of Southern Ocean phytoplankton populations.

That research from the University of Tasmania's Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies (IMAS) was led by PhD student Rob Johnson and Associate Prof Peter Strutton

"This new algorithm allows us to detect changes in plankton numbers that have previously gone unnoticed," said Johnson.

"This better understanding of the phytoplankton population will, in turn, allow us to gain a much more accurate idea of how much carbon this ocean can take up."

Phytoplankton
The importance of phytoplankton and their role in our planetary ecosystem cannot be underestimated.

They form the base of the marine food chain, produce half the oxygen on Earth and are partly responsible for the ocean uptake of at least a third of total human induced CO2 emissions.

So it was important to understand why existing ocean colour satellites systematically underestimated the chlorophyll concentration (a proxy for phytoplankton biomass) of the Southern Ocean and Antarctica.

To get the observations needed to make valid comparisons and develop the algorithm, the researchers used more than 1000 Southern Ocean phytoplankton samples collected over 10 years and compared these to satellite measurements.

Once this observational data was collected, the new algorithm was used to process satellite data and make comparisons.

It quickly became clear that the algorithm produced a much closer estimate of phytoplankton numbers than past satellite measurements.

NASA WISE Finds Lost Asteroid Family Members

This artist's conception shows how families of asteroids are created.

Over the history of our solar system, catastrophic collisions between asteroids located in the belt between Mars and Jupiter have formed families of objects on similar orbits around the sun. 

Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Data from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) have led to a new and improved family tree for asteroids in the main belt between Mars and Jupiter.

Astronomers used millions of infrared snapshots from the asteroid-hunting portion of the WISE all-sky survey, called NEOWISE, to identify 28 new asteroid families.

The snapshots also helped place thousands of previously hidden and uncategorized asteroids into families for the first time.

The findings are a critical step in understanding the origins of asteroid families, and the collisions thought to have created these rocky clans.

"NEOWISE has given us the data for a much more detailed look at the evolution of asteroids throughout the solar system," said Lindley Johnson, the program executive for the Near-Earth Object Observation Program at NASA Headquarters in Washington.

"This will help us trace the NEOs back to their sources and understand how some of them have migrated to orbits hazardous to the Earth."

The main asteroid belt is a major source of near-Earth objects (NEOs), which are those asteroids and comets that come within 28 million miles (45 million kilometers) of Earth's path around the sun.

Some near-Earth objects start out in stable orbits in the main asteroid belt, until a collision or gravitational disturbance flings them inward like flippers in a game of pinball.

The NEOWISE team looked at about 120,000 main belt asteroids out of the approximately 600,000 known.

They found that about 38,000 of these objects, roughly one third of the observed population, could be assigned to 76 families, 28 of which are new. In addition, some asteroids thought to belong to a particular family were reclassified.

NASA MSL: Ancient streambed found on surface of Mars

This set of images compares the Link outcrop of rocks on Mars (left) with similar rocks seen on Earth (right). Credit: NASA

Rounded pebbles on the surface of Mars indicate that a stream once flowed on the red planet, according to a new study by a team of scientists from NASA's Curiosity rover mission, including a University of California, Davis, geologist.

The study will be published in the May 31 issue of the journal Science.

Rounded pebbles of this size are known to form only when transported through water over long distances.

They were discovered between the north rim of the planet's Gale Crater and the base of Mount Sharp, a mountain inside the crater.

The finding represents the first on-site evidence of sustained water flows on the Mars landscape, and supports prospects that the planet could once have been able to host life.

As a co-investigator for NASA's Mars Science Laboratory team, UC Davis geologist and study co-author Dawn Sumner played a key role in choosing Gale Crater as the landing site for Curiosity.

Finding the rounded pebbles, which were deposited more than 2 billion years ago, was a matter of landing in the right place, she said.

"The main reason we chose Gale Crater as a landing site was to look at the layered rocks at the base of Mount Sharp, about five miles away," she said.

"We knew there was an alluvial fan in the landing area, a cone-shaped deposit of sediment that requires flowing water to form. These sorts of pebbles are likely because of that environment. So while we didn't choose Gale Crater for this purpose, we were hoping to find something like this."

The finding comes from Curiosity's exploration of the Mars surface during its first 100 sols (102.7 days on Earth), or Martian days.

During that time, the rover traveled about a quarter mile from its landing site, examining multiple outcrops of pebble-rich slabs.

Curiosity took high-resolution images of these pebbles at three locations known as Goulburn, Link and Hottah.

The grain size, roundness and other characteristics of the pebbles led the researchers to conclude they had been transported by water.

Sumner said the discovery involves some of the most basic principles of geology.

The study area, which has been named 'Hottah', is by all accounts the remains of sediments from the bottom of an ancient stream, which had a relatively strong current. Credit: Malin Space Science Systems

"On the first day of my sedimentary class, I have the students measure grain size and the rounding," Sumner said. "It's simple, and it's important."

Sumner's work in South Africa and Australia studying signs of past microbial life in rocks and her work on living microbial communities in Antarctica helped land her the spot on the Mars Science Laboratory team.

NASA recognized her skills could be critical to the mission's goal: to determine whether there ever could have been life on Mars.

As part of the MSL team, Sumner helped coordinate the first scientific interpretations of what was seen during Curiosity's first few days on Mars, helps direct the rover, via computer, to shoot photographs of the planet, and continues to work on the mission from UC Davis.

NASA MARS Opportunity Rover Found in Standby Safe Mode

NASA's twin Mars rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, have now spent nine years on the surface of Mars.

CREDIT: NASA/JPL

NASA's long-lived Opportunity Mars rover has gone into a self-imposed standby mode on the Red Planet, the robot's handlers say.

Mission controllers for Opportunity, which landed on Mars in January 2004, first learned of the issue on Saturday (April 27).

On that day, the rover got back in touch after a nearly three-week communication moratorium caused by a planetary alignment called a Mars solar conjunction, in which Mars and Earth are on opposite sides of the sun.

The Opportunity rover apparently put itself into standby on April 22 after sensing a problem during a routine camera check, mission managers said.

John Callas

"Our current suspicion is that Opportunity rebooted its flight software, possibly while the cameras on the mast were imaging the sun," Opportunity project manager John Callas, of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., explained in a statement Monday (April 29).

"We found the rover in a standby state called automode, in which it maintains power balance and communication schedules, but waits for instructions from the ground," Callas added.

"We crafted our solar conjunction plan to be resilient to this kind of rover reset, if it were to occur."



Opportunity's handlers prepared new commands Monday designed to spur the rover into resuming operations, mission team members said.

The golf-cart-size Opportunity landed on Mars more than nine years ago along with its twin, Spirit, on a three-month mission to search for signs of past water activity on the Red Planet.

The two rovers found plenty of such evidence, and then kept trundling across Mars. Spirit was declared dead in 2010, but Opportunity is still going strong.

Mars solar conjunctions occur every 26 months, so Opportunity's team knows how to weather them. This most recent conjunction, in fact, is the fifth that the rover has endured.

Mars solar conjunctions affect NASA's entire fleet of robotic Red Planet explorers. Mission controllers resumed sending commands to the agency's venerable Mars Odyssey orbiter Monday and plan to do the same with the Mars rover Curiosity on Wednesday (May 1), officials said.

Has NASA's Curiosity Rover Found Clues to Life's Building Blocks on Mars?

This patch of windblown sand and dust downhill from a cluster of dark rocks is the 'Rocknest' site studied by NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity. 

The Rocknest patch is about 8 feet by 16 feet (1.5 meters by 5 meters) and may contain perchlorate salts. Image added April 1, 2013.

CREDIT: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

NASA's Mars rover Curiosity just might be the latest in a long line of Mars-exploring robots to discover the building blocks for primitive life on the Red Planet.

The Curiosity rover may have gathered evidence for the presence of perchlorates in Rocknest — a sand patch inside the rover's Gale Crater landing site on the Red Planet, scientists say. If so, it shores up the case that the material may well be globally distributed on Mars.

Not only can perchlorates, which are a class of salts, serve as an energy source for potential Martian microorganisms, they are also a sensitive marker of past climate and can lead to the formation of liquid brines under current conditions on the planet.

The possibility that perchlorates are widespread on Mars was detailed in a March 18 presentation at the 44th annual Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in The Woodlands, Texas.


Curiosity's possible detection
The possible detection of perchlorates at Curiosity’s Gale crater site was spotlighted by Doug Archer, a scientist with the Astromaterials Research and Exploration Science Directorate of NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston. He is focused on the habitability of various Martian environments over time. [The Search for Life on Mars

Archer pointed to the rover’s Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instrument suite that recently ran four samples from Rocknest. That area was selected as the source of the first samples analyzed because it is representative of both windblown material in the Gale Crater and the planet's globally distributed dust, he said.

"When we heated this up, we saw a large oxygen release at the same time we saw the release of these chlorinated hydrocarbons," Archer said, thus making a strong case for the presence of perchlorate salts in Rocknest's soil.

Russian Meteorite Impact: One-Kilo Meteorite Fragment Found

One-Kilo Meteorite Fragment Found. 

Image courtesy Russian Academy of Sciences.

Scientists from Russia's Urals Federal University have discovered a meteorite fragment weighing more than one kilogram (2.2 lbs), the largest found so far from the meteorite strike that hit the Urals region on February 15, University expedition chief Viktor Grokhovsky said on Monday.



A total of more than 100 fragments have been found by the expedition along a 50 kilometer (30 mile) trail under the meteorite's flight path, he said.

Over 1,500 people were injured and thousands of buildings damaged when the massive meteorite streaked across the sky over the Russian city of Chelyabinsk.

US space agency NASA estimates the meteorite was roughly 15 meters (50 feet) in diameter when it struck Earth's atmosphere, travelling several times the speed of sound, and exploded into a fireball brighter than the morning sun.

Fragments of the meteorite have been found in an eight-meter (25 feet) wide crater in the region's Lake Chebarkul, scientists said earlier this week.

NASA's Mars Curiosity Rover: Discovers Weird 'Hood Ornament'

A close-up of a shiny, wind-sculpted rock photographed by NASA's Mars rover Curiosity on Jan. 30, 2013. 

CREDIT: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Malin Space Science Systems

NASA's Mars rover Curiosity has photographed a shiny, metallic-looking object that bears a passing resemblance to a door handle or a hood ornament.

However, the Curiosity rover has not stumbled onto evidence of an ancient civilization that took the family van to Olympus Mons for vacation.

The object is simply a rock that the wind has sculpted into an interesting shape, scientists said.

Curiosity scientists stated that "The shiny surface suggests that this rock has a fine grain and is relatively hard."

"Hard, fine-grained rocks can be polished by the wind to form very smooth surfaces."

A shiny-looking Martian rock is visible in this image taken by NASA's Mars rover Curiosity's Mast Camera (Mastcam) during the mission's 173rd Martian day, or sol (Jan. 30, 2013).

CREDIT: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Malin Space Science Systems

Life found on Saturn moon - Titan

Hydrocarbon lakes on Titan may harbour exotic forms of life (Illustration: NASA/JPL)

Hints of life found on Saturn moon

Two potential signatures of life on Saturn's moon Titan have been found by the Cassini spacecraft. But scientists are quick to point out that non-biological chemical reactions could also be behind the observations.

Titan is much too cold to support liquid water on its surface, but some scientists have suggested that exotic life-forms could live in the lakes of liquid methane or ethane that dot the surface.

In 2005, Chris McKay of NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field and Heather R Smith of the International Space University in Strasbourg, France, calculated that such microbes could eke out an existance by breathing in hydrogen gas and eating the organic molecule acetylene, creating methane in the process.

This would result in a lack of acetylene on Titan and a depletion of hydrogen close to the moon's surface, where the microbes would live, they said.

Now, measurements from the Cassini spacecraft have borne out these predictions, hinting that life may be present.

Hungry for hydrogen

Infrared spectra of Titan's surface taken with the Visual and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer (VIMS) showed no sign of acetylene, even though ultraviolet sunlight should constantly trigger its production in the moon's thick atmosphere.

Cassini measurements also suggest hydrogen is disappearing near Titan's surface, according to a study to appear in Icarus.

Observations with the spacecraft's Ion and Neutral Mass Spectrometer and its Composite Infrared Spectrometer revealed that hydrogen produced by UV-triggered chemical reactions in the atmosphere is flowing both upwards and off into space as well as down towards the surface.

ESA XMM Newton and NASA Chandra: Large chunk of missing universe found

Large chunk of missing universe found COSMOS magazine


Scientists using two X-ray telescopes have found evidence for the 'missing matter' in the nearby universe.

This matter is made up of hot diffuse gas, which is known as WHIM (warm-hot intergalactic medium).

To get this result, researchers analyzed X-ray light from a distant quasar that passed through a 'wall' of galaxies about 400 million light-years away.

A large chunk of missing matter - theorised but never before measured - has been discovered as a vast smear of extremely hot intergalactic gas 400 million light-years away.


For the predominant theories about the formation and evolution of the universe to hold true, a certain amount of matter should be present; but large amounts of it have long remained elusive.

Now an international team of astronomers have found most of the missing matter, pinpointing its location using two different X-ray telescopes.

Clues to how galaxies formed
"We didn't just find a 'lost & found' item in the cosmic baryon budget," said Taotao Fang of the University of California at Irvine and lead author of the paper in The Astrophysical Journal, "our findings provide important clues to the question of how galaxies formed and evolved.

"The missing matter we found are the leftovers from the early galaxy formation process," said Fang.

The missing matter has long been hypothesised, and some of it has even been spotted before; but previous observations did not uncover the full extent of this massive gas cloud.
Higher temperatures
"What [previous studies] found is the missing matter at lower temperatures ... about 10-20% of the total missing matter," said Fang. "What we found are missing matter at higher temperatures and account for the majority 80 to 90% of the missing matter."
By using two X-ray telescopes, instead of one visible light telescope as in previous studies, the exact location of the missing matter could be calculated and the results were more robust.
The X-ray telescopes that captured the images identifying the location of the missing matter are housed on NASA's Chandra and the European Space Agency's XMM-Newton - which has a command centre in Perth, Australia. Both orbital observatories that have been in space since 1999.

New Anti-matter Exotic Particle Found

In a single collision of gold nuclei at the RHIC particle accelerator, many hundreds of particles are emitted.

The particles leave telltale tracks in the STAR detector (shown here from the end and side).

Scientists analysed about a hundred million collisions to spot the new antinuclei, identified via their characteristic decay into a light isotope of antihelium and a positive pi-meson. Altogether, 70 examples of the new antinucleus were found. Credit: BNL

Scientists have created a never-before seen type of exotic matter that is thought to have been present at the earliest stages of the universe, right after the Big Bang.

The new matter is a particularly weird form of antimatter, which is like a mirror-image of regular matter. Every normal particle is thought to have an antimatter partner, and if the two come into contact, they annihilate.

The recent feat of matter-tinkering was accomplished by smashing charged gold atoms at each other at super-high speeds in a particle accelerator called the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, N.Y.

Among the many particles that resulted from this crash were bizarre objects called anti-hypertritons. Not only are these things antimatter, but they're also what's called strange matter. Where normal atomic nuclei are made of protons and neutrons (which are made of "up" quarks and "down" quarks), strange nuclei also have so-called Lambda particles that contain another flavour of quark called "strange" as well. These Lambda particles orbit around the protons and neutrons.

If all that is a little much to straighten out, just think of anti-hypertritons as several kinds of weird.

Though they normally don't exist on Earth, these particles may be hiding in the universe in very hot, dense places like the centers of some stars, and most likely were around when the universe was extremely young and energetic, and all the matter was packed into a very small, sweltering space.

NASA: Cocaine found in Shuttle Discovery Hanger

NASA has launched an extensive investigation to determine how a small amount of cocaine ended up in a space shuttle hangar at the agency's Florida spaceport.

A bag containing a small amount of white powder residue that was later confirmed to be cocaine was discovered in the space shuttle Discovery's hangar at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla.

The hangar, known in NASA parlance as an Orbiter Processing Facility, is a restricted zone for shuttle workers only.

The cocaine was discovered Tuesday when a shuttle worker spotted it outside a bathroom and reported it to NASA security, NASA spokesperson Allard Beutel told SPACE.com today.

An on-site test of the bag stated it was cocaine, and subsequent follow-up tests confirmed it was the drug, he said.

"This is a rare and isolated incident, and I'm disappointed that it happened, but it should not detract from the outstanding work that is being done by a dedicated team on a daily basis," said Bob Cabana, a former astronaut and director of the Kennedy Space Center, in a statement. "We are conducting an investigation and working with center security and law enforcement officials to get to the bottom of it."

Alchemy is back - Gold found in Bacterium

Move over, Midas. A genetically modified version of a bacterium that extracts gold from its environment can signal the presence of the precious metal. The result could be a boon for prospectors.

Some bacteria are known to be associated with gold deposits, but it has been unclear whether they play a role in its production – and if so, what that is.

Now Frank Reith of the University of Adelaide, South Australia, has found that dissolved gold is harmful to the bacterium Cupriavidus metallidurans, as it forms a toxic sulphur-containing compound when it is absorbed from the environment. This compound inhibits the bacterium's enzyme function, prompting the distressed microbe to activate a cluster of "gold detox" genes that produce enzymes able to convert the soluble gold compounds into harmless particles of metallic gold.

Hand-held prospector
Knowing how microbes do this will open up a whole new way of prospecting, says co-author Gregor Grass of the University of Nebraska. Reith and Grass have developed a genetically modified version of C. metallidurans that produces a visible response when the detox genes are switched on.

"When the microbes come into contact with gold, they flash a light that can be detected using a hand-held photometer," says Grass. He envisages that prospectors will be able to detect whether gold is present simply by taking a sample of soil and adding modified bacteria to it.

"There have been reports that bacteria can enhance the production of gold for some time," says John Stolz, an environmental microbiologist at the Bayer School of Natural and Environmental Sciences at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. "But this is the first time scientists have actually identified how they do it."

Journal reference: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0904583106.