#Swedish space rock may be piece of early life puzzle A fossil meteorite unlike anything seen before has been uncovered in a Swedish quarry.
The mysterious rock may be known the first piece of the bullet that sparked an explosion of life on early Earth.
when Earth experienced a mysterious burst of new species. Now miners working in the Swedish quarry have found a meteorite fragment that is not an L chondrite.
About 515 million years ago our planet was going through an evolutionary slump. A burst of diversity that happened during the Cambrian period had tapered off
and broke apart between Mars and Jupiter. The larger object spawned the cloud of L chondrites that bombarded Earth for about 10 million years.
According to one popular idea this intense meteor shower caused just enough destruction to open up ecological niches
Earth and Planetary Science Letters DOI: 10.1016/j. epsl. 2014.05.03 3
#How to cash in on cheap Earth-watching satellites THERE ARE some big plans brewing for small satellites. With hordes of cheap orbiters filling the skies researchers
and start-ups are promising a powerful new perspective on earthly activities that range from global commerce to perfecting the art of mining landfills for recyclable materials.
Then there are rare-earth metals that could be retrieved from discarded electronics along with bits of tin copper and gold.
But it could later switch to satellites like the 28 imaging cubesats that the firm Planet Labs of San francisco already has in orbit.
Planet Labs ultimately wants a fleet of 100 of the tiny satellites enough to refresh its imagery of the entire planet once a day says Arin Jumpasut a Planet Labs imaging engineer.
Several hundred million years after Earth formed when life was emerging our young planet had an atmosphere oceans and primordial continents.
But it did not yet have an ozone layer to shield the surface from the sun's harshest ultraviolet rays.
but there have been countless space rock strikes in Earth's history. That raised a whole bunch of questions about
whether the unique geology of impact craters could have been a good UV shield on the early Earth says Casey Bryce a member of Cockell's lab. Bryce
The bacteria received radiation doses far more intense than conditions on early Earth. When the samples were returned to the lab the microbes in the glass discs were dead.
so Pontefract thinks impacts could have helped kick-start life on rocky planets and then shielded whatever emerged.
Crater rocks could provide refuges even now for life on other planets such as Mars she says.
#Impossibly heavy planet is the first'mega-Earth'Sly Stallone has nothing on this rocky heavyweight.
Twice the size of Earth and with 17 times our planet's mass Kepler-10c is so unusual that it has been placed in a brand new class of exoplanet.
The planet orbits a star that is about 560 light years away from us. It has a radius slightly more than double that of Earth's a size that led astronomers to assume it was a shrunken version of gassy planet Neptune
which is four times larger than Earth. Now Xavier Dumusque of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge Massachusetts and his colleagues have used the HARPS-N telescope in the Canary islands to pin down Kepler-10c's mass.
They found it is actually 17 times as heavy as Earth: more or less the same mass as Neptune.
But because Kepler-10c is much smaller then Neptune it must be an incredibly dense rocky world the like
of which has never been seen before. All the major existing planetary formation models were not predicting this type of planet
and it is why we could not believe our result at the beginning says Dumusque who presented the findings at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Boston this week.
But the team checked for a bevy of possible errors that might have been caused by the telescope itself
Calculations by geophysicists previously suggested that gravity should compress planets so much that rocky worlds can't get bigger than twice Earth's size says Kepler team member Geoff Marcy at the University of California Berkeley.
This suggestion of a rocky planet 2. 3 times the size of Earth blows me away he says.
The team has dubbed Kepler-10c a mega-Earth because it is too heavy to fit into the super-Earth class of exoplanets
which are bigger than our home world but much lighter than Neptune. It is made probably from the same materials as Earth water silicates
and iron but in different proportions says Dumusque. Kepler-10c is denser than Earth but still it is far from being made of pure iron
which would be the physical limit for planets he says. Neighbouring planet Kepler-10b was already famous among planet hunters for being confirmed the first rocky world outside our solar system.
But it is very close to its star completing a full orbit in just 20 hours.
The more we find planets outside the solar system the more we are surprised by the diversity of these new worlds says Dumusque e
#Spacex unveils sleek reusable Dragon crew capsule First cargo now crew the uber-modern space taxi known as the Dragon V2 is ready for passengers.
At an unveiling ceremony yesterday complete with smoke effects and coloured lights Spacex CEO Elon musk gave the world its first glimpse of the upgraded Dragon spacecraft.
The results will hopefully prove handy for Musk who hopes to eventually shuttle humans on the long trip to Mars
One flies just within Earth's orbit around the sun the other just outside it allowing the pair to obtain unique measurements of solar wind behaviour.
We can only see this effect from Earth if the two objects are aligned perfectly. Now a team led by Robert Quimby at the University of Tokyo Japan has confirmed the first case of this lensing effect in a type 1a supernova:
#NASA'flying saucer'for Mars to land in Hawaii In June while beachgoers in Hawaii sit blissfully unaware a flying saucer will descend over the island of Kauai.
and one day people on the surface of Mars. The Low density supersonic decelerator (LDSD) will be lofted into the stratosphere from the US NAVY's Pacific Missile Range Facility on Kauai.
We really only have two options for stopping at Mars: rockets and aerodynamic drag. Until recently NASA had used parachutes and airbags for most robotic landings on Mars starting with the Viking mission in 1976.
But the heavier the load the harder it is to come in softly. For the car-sized Curiosity NASA invented an ambitious system called the sky crane
which is just 1 per cent as dense as Earth's. Unfortunately rocket-powered landings are out of the question too as the atmosphere is still just thick enough to buffet incoming spacecraft with more turbulence than thrusters can accommodate.
To simulate Mars's thin atmosphere On earth the team in Hawaii will first lift a test vehicle fitted with the LDSD system to about 37 kilometres above the Pacific ocean using a high-altitude balloon.
As it falls back to Earth the system will inflate and moments later the parachute will fire.
In addition to landing human missions on Mars the system could help robotic craft safely land in Martian mountains or highlands.
Think about it like a bridge for humans to Mars. This is the next step in a sequence of technologies that would need to be developed d
#Squirting moons face off in race to find alien life Icebound seas just keep getting hotter at least as candidates for life beyond Earth.
In December astronomers announced hints of watery plumes spurting from Jupiter's large moon Europa potentially giving us a peek into a vast ocean likely to exist beneath its ice.
Saturn's moon Enceladus stole back the limelight last week when NASA reported firm evidence of an ocean linked to geysers at its south pole (see diagram below.
Data from NASA's Galileo probe which orbited Jupiter from 1995 to 2003 show clay-like minerals on Europa's surface probably debris from meteor impacts
And Jupiter's strong magnetic field means that intense radiation surrounds the moon which makes it difficult for spacecraft to operate.
that we have not just one but two candidates for seeking life beyond Earth h
#NASA's Russia boycott may revitalise US space leadership So NASA has been dragged into the fallout over Russia's seizure of Crimea from Ukraine.
#Buried'Lake superior'seen on Saturn's moon Enceladus Saturn's icy moon Enceladus already known for spitting plumes of water into space just got even more interesting.
which orbits Jupiter also spews plumes of water. Both moons are now among the hottest prospects in the solar system for finding alien life
if only a suitable mission could be arranged NASA's Cassini orbiter first spotted spectacular plumes at Enceladus's south pole in 2005 shortly after arriving at Saturn.
The plumes shoot into space at supersonic speeds feeding one of Saturn's famous rings
and there are no firm plans for future craft to return to Saturn. However Cassini team member Carolyn Porco at the Space science Institute in Boulder Colorado has written a paper (soon to appear in the journal Astrobiology) arguing for a mission to collect samples from Enceladus and return them to Earth.
She says the new results bode well for such an effort. The next mission there can immediately get down to the business of searching for signs of life or its precursor chemistry.
Astronauts are screened carefully for health issues before leaving Earth, and the ISS has an escape capsule standing by in case of emergencies,
But NASA has plans for human missions to an asteroid and eventually Mars and getting home quickly won't be an option.
#Earth raises a plasma shield to battle solar storms Earth can raise shields to protect itself against solar storms.
For the first time satellites and ground-based detectors have watched as the planet sends out a tendril of plasma to fight off blasts of charged solar matter.
The discovery confirms a longstanding theory about Earth's magnetic surroundings and offers us a way to keep track of the planet's defences.
It's changed our thinking about how the system operates says Joe Borovsky at the Space science Institute in Boulder Colorado who was involved not in the research.
Earth doesn't just sit there and take whatever the solar wind gives it it can actually fight back.
Earth is surrounded always by a bubble of magnetism called the magnetosphere which protects us from the bulk of the solar wind a stream of high-energy particles constantly flowing from the sun
. But sometimes the sun's magnetic field lines can directly link up with Earth's in a process called magnetic reconnection which opens up cracks in the magnetosphere.
Charged particles can flow along these lines into Earth's atmosphere leading to dazzling auroras as well as geomagnetic storms that can wreak havoc on navigation systems and power grids.
Gas in Earth's upper atmosphere is ionised by ultraviolet light from the sun and the resulting plasma becomes trapped by magnetic fields in a doughnut-shaped ring around the planet.
Previous observations of this plasmasphere showed that plumes sometimes emerge from this region. Theory had suggested that an extra-strong electric field from the sun can rip plasma away from the plasmasphere during reconnection triggering a plume.
For the first time we were able to monitor the entire cycle of this plasma stretching from the atmosphere to the boundary between Earth's magnetic field
when does the Earth decide to protect us? By validating this tool we're now able to figure that out t
But what about our own future Mars colonies or space probes millions of kilometres away? Spacecraft currently use radio waves to beam information back home.
by the time it reaches Earth. Now a nanoscale light detector could make such deep-space missives easier to read.
Laser communication is one of the technologies we are considering says Bas Lansdorp CEO of the Mars One project which aims to place a human colony on Mars by 2025.
#Japan's huge magnetic net will trawl for space junk SOMEWHERE in Earth's orbit a satellite explodes into a terrifying cloud of debris. Moments later Sandra bullock
Hundreds of thousands of pieces of spacecraft satellites and other equipment from human spaceflight zip around our planet some travelling faster than the speed of sound.
which creates an electromagnetic field that attracts the debris and pushes the net away from Earth's geomagnetic field.
and net to burn up as they enter Earth's atmosphere. JAXA thinks the net's main advantage is its simplicity#it's lightweight
The moon is the nearest island in space out from the Earth says Igor Mitrofanov at Russia's Institute for Space Research in Moscow the project scientist for two planned Russian-led rover missions.
As countries develop their space programmes the moon is a natural first foray beyond Earth that allows remote-controlled robots to get their sea legs
while staying within a 10-second call of the planet's shores. But the moon is more than a test bed for space missions.
and evolution of the moon is to know those of Earth says Tatsuaki Hashimoto of the Japan aerospace exploration agency the lead scientist for a proposed lunar rover called SELENE-2. The moon is thought to have coalesced from the debris of an impact between a Mars-sized world and Earth
It's a part of the Earth says Foing. I call it the eighth continent. Several of the proposed exploration missions are targeting the moon's poles
and any organic material it might hold in deep freeze could shed light on where Earth got its water
If we're really interested in extending our reach to Mars and beyond we don't want to have to bring fuel with us says Anthony Colaprete of NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field California.
and teams of human miners to the moon to supply water for fuel depots that it would place in Earth orbit t
switch orbits or voyage to other planets feats usually reserved for large, expensive craft. They could even provide us with a global Wi-fi system On earth.
They are typically put into low Earth orbit by a rocket where they remain for around 6 months,
before spiralling in and burning up in Earth's atmosphere. Although they have made space accessible to groups who wouldn't otherwise have been able to afford it most recently a team of high-school students Cubesats haven't done much cutting-edge science."
They hope their propelled Cubesats will one day fly to Saturn's moon Enceladus and Jupiter's moon Europa, both
A fleet of Cubesats with propulsion in orbit around a planet or moon can do a lot of things that big expensive satellites cannot, such as monitoring several locations in the atmosphere at once.
#India blasts off for Mars: here's what it will Do it's the Mount everest of the solar system conquered only by an elite group.
and Europe in the exclusive club by sending a probe to Mars. The Mars Orbiter Mission blasted off from the southeastern coast of India on 5 november.
The main goal of the $73 million Mars Orbiter Mission (MOM) is to prove that India can put a working probe into Mars orbit.
and radiation conditions at Mars he says. This was a problem for Chandrayaan-1 which discovered water on the lunar surface but died more than a year early
MOM should also help to unravel some of the planet's mysteries. It will carry five scientific instruments including a methane sensor to try to pick up the gas in Mars's atmosphere.
On earth methane is produced mainly by life so there was a stir when Earth-based instruments and a European probe detected traces of it in Mars's atmosphere a decade ago.
Some are sceptical of those results believing they were triggered by methane in Earth's atmosphere
or perhaps water in Mars's and recently NASA's Curiosity rover added to the scepticism by finding no methane when it breathed in the Martian air.
I'd say the data are equivocal at the moment says John Mustard of Brown University in Providence Rhode island.
MOM may also help reveal how Mars became a cold dry planet with an atmosphere too thin to support liquid water for long periods.
A study published this week suggests a form of natural geoengineering was partially responsible for the red planet's global cooling.
and look down upon mother Earth says executive producer Mark Burnett who has created previously other reality shows like Survivor and The Voice.
For those looking beyond low Earth orbit Mars One is also continuing with its plans to send humans on a televised one-way mission to the Red planet by 2023.
Mars One does not yet have a craft capable of leaving Earth but CEO Bas Lansdorp says it plans to launch its first show in 2014 detailing the crew selection process.
but says Mars One will be different. This is much more serious than selecting a few people who are going to become pop stars it's more like The Apprentice.
A physical simulation of a comet's impact with a planet shows that the conditions are extreme enough to create amino acids within the comet's ice.
whether life or its ingredients could have travelled to Earth on the back of a comet or asteroid.
Then they shot the ice with a steel pellet travelling at about 7 kilometres a second to simulate the comet smacking into a planet
This is a neat way of suggesting prebiotic material could be produced regardless of the external conditions of the planet says Goldman.
You could have a planet that isn't really conducive to forming amino acids like early Earth supposedly wasn't he says.
what the planet looks like. Journal reference: Nature Geoscience DOI: 10.1038/ngeo1930correction: When this article was published first on 15 september it did not give details of the researcher who detected amino acids in the ice.
NASA's LADEE moon orbiter due to launch on 7 september will use laser pulses to exchange high-capacity signals with Earth.
LLCD will beam signals to Earth at 622 megabits per second six times as fast as is currently possible from the moon.
or from human missions to Mars suggests LLCD manager Donald Cornwell. If you have an ill astronaut it would be nice to have a 3d image of them he says
Earth's atmosphere including clouds can also thwart laser signals. To maximise the chance of cloudless skies LLCD will be able to beam its light to any of three detectors in New mexico California or Spain.
or so of LADEE's planned four months in lunar orbit but a follow-on mission called LCRD will test laser links from Earth orbit for two years beginning in 2017.
Future Chinese missions could bring lunar samples back to Earth perhaps around 2017 and possibly land people on the moon in the 2020s says Dean Cheng of the Heritage Foundation a think tank in WASHINGTON DC.
#Japanese probe to sniff out why planets lose gases Update 16 september: Epsilon took off at 2pm local time on 14 september.
About an hour later the Spectroscopic Planet Observatory for Recognition of Interaction of Atmosphere (SPRINT-A) separated from the launch rocket.
the world's first space telescope designed to study the planets from afar. The Spectroscopic Planet Observatory for Recognition of Interaction of Atmosphere or Sprint-A will look at Venus
and Mars to find out why some worlds lose their atmospheres while others manage to keep a grip on their gases.
This will in turn help exoplanet hunters figure out which distant worlds are capable of hosting atmospheres that might support life.
Sprint-A will also peer at Jupiter's moon Io the most volcanically active body in the solar system to see how the tiny moon influences Jupiter's mighty auroras.
If all goes to plan the Epsilon rocket will launch from Japan's Uchinoura Space center on 27 august at 0445 UTC.
It will deploy Sprint-A into low Earth orbit where the spacecraft will take aim at the planets using cameras and sensors that record extreme-ultraviolet light.
Extreme UV from the sun gets bent at the boundary where a planet's atmosphere meets space
But extreme UV radiation coming from space is absorbed by the Earth's atmosphere so it is not observable from the ground says Sawai.
So far our best clues to the original atmospheres of Mars and Venus come from the composition
and structure of ancient rocks either meteorites that made it to Earth from those planets
Based on the evidence it seems that Mars Earth and Venus probably had similar atmospheres long ago.
which can ionise gases in a planet's upper atmosphere and pick up the newly charged particles effectively sweeping them away.
Earth is protected from the solar wind by a relatively strong global magnetic field which repels charged particles from the sun explains Nick Schneider of the Laboratory for Atmospheric
Because Venus is closer to the sun the solar wind might have stripped gaseous water from its early atmosphere leaving a thick haze of mostly carbon dioxide that turned the planet's surface into a hellish desert.
And while Mars is farther away it has no global magnetic field. It is thought the solar wind thinned the Red planet's atmosphere over time making it cold and dry.
It turns out that most atmospheres have lost a lot of gas over their lifetimes. On Mars it may be as much as 99 per cent.
What drives the escaping is a big question says Schneider. Solar stripping is a leading hypothesis
For instance others have suggested that Mars lost its atmosphere all of a sudden during a powerful collision with an asteroid or comet.
A NASA probe called Maven due to launch in November will orbit Mars to study its atmosphere up close to try to solve the puzzle.
Sprint-A will help from afar by looking for the extreme UV radiation generated as the solar wind slams into the upper atmospheres of both Mars
By observing this phenomenon we will investigate how the solar wind affects the upper atmosphere of planets and how the planetary atmosphere escapes into outer space.
The results may add a new twist to the search for exoplanets that can support life says Schneider.
Until recently a planet's habitability was defined largely by its distance from its star which hints at
#Star twinkles could help pin down planet sizes Twinkle twinkle little star and show us just how little you are.
Starlight captured by the Kepler space telescope has revealed that the amount a star flickers is tied to its size offering a better way to measure a wide variety of stars and their associated planets.
Unfortunately that may be mixed news for seekers of Earth-sized worlds. Kepler was designed to spot transits the periodic dips in a star's brightness indicating that a planet has passed in front of it.
The telescope's vigil required exquisite targeting precision and key parts of its steering system are broken now ending the telescope's main mission as an exoplanet hunter.
But you haven't heard the last of Kepler. Two years'worth of data still need inspecting including information about the thousands of stars in its field of view.
Figuring out the properties of stars is vital to planet surveys. When a planet transits a star the amount of light it blocks is used to calculate its size.
That can help to pinpoint whether it is rocky like Earth or gassy like Jupiter as long as the star's size is known.
Simply looking at a star's colour can reveal whether it is small and compact like our sun
or big and bloated like a red giant the type of star the sun will swell into in about 5 billion years.
That's probably because each granule spans some two dozen times the width of the Earth in a giant star compared to just a fraction of the Earth's diameter in a compact star.
How will that affect the count of Earth-sized worlds? Kepler's principal investigator William Borucki expects the current pool of candidates to shrink.
and therefore the planets that they host so many worlds currently deemed Earthlike may turn out to be too big.
Still the flicker method could be put to use on NASA's next planet hunter the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) due to launch in 2017.
The method can put several small satellites into orbit around Earth eliminating the need for dedicated launch vehicles and making citizen-science missions like Ardusat more affordable.
but a list of ideas from the developers includes tracking meteorites and making a 3d model of Earth's magnetosphere.
The first two satellites will orbit for three to seven months before burning up as they fall to Earth.
Our own sun and the Earth and all of us are made up of atoms that came out of other stars'stellar winds long ago says Mccomas. There's a big recycling process that occurs
That's a realistic prospect now that three potentially habitable planets a record have been glimpsed orbiting the same star.
Earlier studies had suggested that a nearby star Gliese 667c had three planets only one of which might support life.
But the very presence of multiple planets made their precise number hard to tease out.
They found evidence for up to seven worlds including three rocky planets in the star's habitable zone where temperatures should suit life.
which can detect how a star is tugged back and forth by the gravity of an orbiting planet.
The five strongest signals were from planets between 1. 94 and 5. 94 times the mass of Earth making them all likely to be rocky.
Larger rockets would take you pretty quickly from one planet to the other one to two months at most says Anglada-Escudé.
That's assuming the new trio of habitable planets is real. In 2010 two of the paper's co-authors were acclaimed
when they claimed to have found the first potentially habitable rocky planet around the star Gliese 581 a discovery others were unable to confirm.
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