NASA's most high-stakes, ambitious planetary mission in decades is scheduled to launch this week with a goal right out of science fiction: to learn whether Mars was, or ever could be, home to extraterrestrial life. If the unmanned Mars Science Laboratory lifts off and travels a 354 million-mile path to Mars, it will lower to the surface a sedan-size rover called Curiosity, which…
November 20, 2011
For decades, space scientists have searched Mars for signs of water, the liquid generally believed to be essential for life. Now, they may well have found it. Scientists announced yesterday that they had detected dozens of slopes across the southern hemisphere of the planet where previously undetected dark streaks come and go with the seasons. When the planet heats up, the streaks…
August 5, 2011
Florida
The 135th and final flight of America's space shuttle fleet landed safely at the Kennedy Space Center early yesterday - ending the three-decade lifetime of a technologically remarkable and versatile spacecraft the likes of which the world is unlikely to see for a very long time. The shuttle Atlantis and its four crew members touched down in Florida at 5:56 a.m., shortly before…
July 22, 2011
The mysterious plume of icy material spewing from the bottom of Saturn's moon Enceladus appears to be made up of salty water vapor that scientists now think may come from a vast ocean under its surface. New measurements taken closer to the moon, collected during 2008 and 2009 flybys of the Cassini-Huygens spacecraft, large grains of ice with substantial amounts of salt found for…
June 23, 2011
Over the past 100 years, some two-thirds of the large predator fish in the ocean have been caught and consumed by humans, and in the decades ahead, the rest are likely to perish, too. Small fish such as sardines and anchovies are flourishing in the absence of the tuna, grouper and cod that traditionally feed on them, creating an ecological imbalance that experts say will forever…
February 22, 2011
California
All life is based on a single genetic model that requires the element phosphorus as one of its six essential components. But now researchers may have found a bacterium that has five of those essential elements but has, in effect, replaced phosphorus with its look-alike but toxic cousin, arsenic. News of the discovery caused a scientific commotion, including calls to NASA from…
December 3, 2010
gulf of mexico
Oil from the BP blowout is degrading rapidly in the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico and becoming increasingly difficult to find on the water surface, the head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said yesterday. "The light crude oil is biodegrading quickly," NOAA director Jane Lubchenco said during the response team daily briefing. "Significant oil has been…
July 28, 2010
By the time its odyssey ended this month in the Australian outback, the spacecraft Hayabusa had been gone three years longer than planned, lost its main engine, disappeared from all interplanetary notice for more than seven weeks and may have failed to perform its main mission. Yet the voyage was justifiably and immediately hailed as the stuff of legend. Against all odds, the Japanese…
June 30, 2010
Louisiana
With the prospects dimming for capping the Deepwater Horizon oil well blowout anytime soon, federal, state and local officials are actively assessing a plan to quickly and massively shore up the battered barrier islands that protect the Louisiana marshlands. The plan, which local officials hope to present to the White House within days, calls for building up almost 70 miles of…
May 10, 2010
NASA officials laid out plans yesterday to boost spending on climate research substantially over the next five years to make up for cutbacks during the Bush administration. Edward Weiler, the agency's associate administrator for science, said that NASA's Earth Science budget will get a $2.4 billion, or 62 percent, increase through 2015. By that point, the program will have launched…
April 1, 2010
As senior astronomer of the S.E.T.I. Institute in California, Seth Shostak has been at the center of the sometimes admired, sometimes dismissed effort to pick up extraterrestrial radio communication. Shostak joined S.E.T.I. (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) in 1990 and has struggled with two overriding issues: trying to detect those alien communications with increasingly…
March 22, 2009
Did you know that 365 - the number of days in a year - is equal to 10 times 10, plus 11 times 11, plus 12 times 12?
Or that the sum of any number of successive odd numbers always equals a square number - as in 1 + 3 = 4 (2 squared), while 1 + 3 + 5 = 9 (3 squared) and 1 + 3 + 5 + 7 = 16 (4 squared)?
March 1, 2009
Something is happening beneath the surface of Mars that causes substantial amounts of methane gas to burst out regularly, a discovery that NASA scientists say represents the strongest indication so far that life might exist, or once existed, on the planet.
The methane is released into the atmosphere in specific areas and at regular times, they found, in a pattern that would be consistent…
January 18, 2009
A federal appeals court yesterday threw out a major component of the Bush administration's effort to reduce unhealthy levels of soot and smog in Eastern and Midwestern states, a decision that environmental groups worry will delay action on air pollution well into the next administration.
A three-judge panel on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled…
July 12, 2008
