NASA Mars programme retains focus on sample return

NASA Mars programme retains focus on sample return

After months of effort, NASA on Tuesday released the results of a study that laid out options for the Mars programme — a re-planning process that was kicked off in the wake of the agency’s devastating pull-out of the joint 2016/2018 ExoMars missions with the European Space Agency, and one that was made more urgent by the crummy budget that the planetary sciences division was handed in February.  Read more

Fermilab prepares for a future of muons

Fermilab is creating high-intensity muon beams for two experiments.

At Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, protons were always the primary particles, coursing through the circular tracks of the Tevatron, which until 2009 was the highest energy collider in the world. But there’s a new particle making the rounds at the Batavia, Illinois campus: the muon, a heavy but short-lived cousin of the electron — interesting both for its usefulness in testing the Standard Model, as well as potentially being used someday in a powerful collider.  Read more

Curiosity seeks methane in atmospheric samples

Curiosity seeks methane in atmospheric samples

A month after landing on Mars, the NASA Curiosity rover is about to begin testing out the shoulder and elbow joints of its robotic arm, mission managers said today in a press briefing at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. The upper-body calisthenics come as an instrument in the rover’s guts goes after one of the important early science questions of the mission: whether Mars has methane, which can be produced both biologically and geologically.  Read more

Dawn departs Vesta, aims for Ceres

Dawn departs Vesta, aims for Ceres

Dawn, NASA’s mission to explore the asteroid belt’s two most massive bodies, has left its first target, Vesta, in a belch of ionized xenon. On 5 September, the probe fired its ion thruster — which creates thrust by using electricity to ionize a store of xenon — and made its way away from the asteroid, ending a campaign to map the asteroid that began in July 2011.  While the science team has had no trouble in being seduced by Vesta’s charms — its layered interior points towards a formation process more like a planet’s than a simple asteroid’s — it did have trouble settling on a coordinate system that would pass muster with the International Astronomical Union. Now, Dawn moves towards an appointment in early 2015 with Ceres, the dwarf planet which is thought to harbour substantial amounts of subterranean ice.  Read more

Court upholds federal funding of embryonic stem cell research

A senior US appeals court ruled today that the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) is legally able to fund human embryonic stem cell research. The decision means that the plaintiffs in the case, two adult stem cell researchers who are trying to stop the funding, have few options left. Their lawyers said today that they are considering asking the final arbiter, the US Supreme Court, to hear their appeal. But that court accepts only about 1% of the cases it is asked to hear.  Read more

NASA Curiosity rover fires its laser

NASA Curiosity rover fires its laser

It wasn’t a drive-by shooting, because it hasn’t moved an inch yet. But that’s about to change. On 19 August, the Mars Curiosity rover tested out the laser on its ChemCam instrument for the first time. The laser fired 30 pulses within 10 seconds at a fist-sized rock nicknamed “Coronation” (pictured), and a camera recorded the spectra of the induced sparks.  Read more

NASA selects mission to explore interior of Mars

NASA selects mission to explore interior of Mars

NASA will be landing on Mars again. Just weeks after the successful landing of the Mars rover Curiosity, NASA on Tuesday announced that it had selected a mission that in 2016 would land near the equator of Mars in order to listen to the tremors rumbling through the planet’s interior. The $425 million mission, called InSight (Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport) could expect to hear quakes as large as magnitude 4.5 or 5 in its two-year mission.  Read more