In 1991, NASA began upgrading the inertial measurement units with an inertial navigation system (INS), which provided more accurate location information. SHARAD has provided strong evidence that the LDAs in Hellas Planitia are glaciers that are covered with a thin layer of debris (i.e. rocks and dust); a strong reflection from the top and base of LDAs was observed, suggesting that pure water ice makes up the bulk of the formation (between the two reflections). A long vapor trail across the sky marked the rain of debris. Ceres is a dwarf planet that lies between Mars and Jupiter in our own solar system. Currently, NASA has plans to get closer to Ceres to check out the crater and find out what these bright spots might actually be. This test run shores up hope that if microbes also thrive just below the Martian surface, a robot can find them. Now, if you’ve ever been to the ocean and looked out across a single white sandy beach, which contains a nearly uncountable number of grains of sand, you would probably find this theory impossible to believe. American astronomer, cosmologist, and astrophysicist Carl Sagan long had a theory that there were more stars in the universe than grains of sand on the Earth, one he created long before we had the ability to discover if he was right.

But what’s one of the leading theories? Theories about what these bright spots might be abound, and it has not yet been proven exactly what is causing them. You might think that heating the orbiter would be a problem. On July 5, NASA announced that the problem was determined to be a timing flaw in a command sequence used to prepare the spacecraft for its flyby, and the spacecraft would resume scheduled science operations on July 7. The science observations lost because of the anomaly were judged to have no impact on the mission’s main objectives and minimal impact on other objectives. “This first data from Parker reveals our star, the Sun, in new and surprising ways,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for science at NASA Headquarters in Washington. In Mars orbit or deep space, the dose rate would be significantly more,” said RAD’s principal investigator, Don Hassler of Southwest Research Institute’s Solar System Science and Exploration Division in Boulder, Colorado.

The Kepler telescope we talked about earlier basically watches for the passing of objects in front of stars, which are most often identified as planets orbiting the star, just like Earth and the other planets in our solar system orbit the Sun. A report from the March issue of the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society detailed how this red giant star, located in galaxy GSN 069 (about 250 million light-years from Earth), roamed just a little too close to a supermassive black hole and became ensnared in its grasp. One origin of life on Earth could be the result of a remarkable and inexplicable pathway to life. Except, one lucky star managed to escape a black hole’s wrath, at least for a moment. Hint: If you’re a regular reader of our site content, you’ll have an edge with this one! They expected to see stars near a galaxy’s center, where the visible matter is more concentrated, move faster than stars at the edge. True to the essence of our early-stage research center, we’ve been doing the hard and future-focused homework so that NASA is ready for the next giant leaps in exploration.

The nature of dark energy, quantum fluctuations, and the quantum vacuum are all areas of active research that could shed light on the universe’s history and its ultimate fate. Kids are usually looking for something with a little more zing & pop. As pictures beamed back from planetary probes and rovers since 1964 have shown, Mars is a desolate, lifeless planet with seemingly little to offer humans. Why would we ever want to go to Mars? This overcrowding, or the possibility of planetary disaster, will force us to eventually consider new homes in our solar system, and Mars may have more to offer us than the photos of its barren landscape now show. But, finding microbial biosignatures on Mars, he cautions, could be very challenging for a remotely operated Mars rover as they found that the subsurface population of bacteria were extremely patchy, correlating with increased salt levels that restricted the availability of water for the microbes to have access to. Not only is the region bone-dry – the core of the desert doesn’t get any rainfall for decades – because of its elevation, it also receives high levels of damaging ultraviolet radiation. If you get into a cage match with a black hole, well, it won’t be pretty.