Pasadena, U.S.A. — NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity has begun driving from its landing site, which scientists announced today they have named for the late author Ray Bradbury. Making its first movement on the Martian surface, Curiosity’s drive combined forward, turn and reverse segments. This placed the rover roughly 20 feet (6 meters) from the spot where it landed August 6th.

NASA has approved the Curiosity science team’s choice to name the landing ground for the influential author who was born 92 years ago today and died this year. The location where Curiosity touched down is now called Bradbury Landing. “This was not a difficult choice for the science team,” said Michael Meyer, NASA program scientist for Curiosity. “Many of us and millions of other readers were inspired in our lives by stories Ray Bradbury wrote to dream of the possibility of life on Mars.”

The drive confirmed the health of Curiosity’s mobility system and produced the rover’s first wheel tracks on Mars, documented in images taken after the drive. During a news conference at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif., the mission’s lead rover driver, Matt Heverly, showed an animation derived from visualization software used for planning the first drive. “We have a fully functioning mobility system with lots of amazing exploration ahead,” Heverly said.

Curiosity will spend several more days of working beside Bradbury Landing, performing instrument checks and studying the surroundings, before embarking toward its first driving destination approximately 1,300 feet (400 meters) to the east-southeast.”

Curiosity is a much more complex vehicle than earlier Mars rovers. The testing and characterization activities during the initial weeks of the mission lay important groundwork for operating our precious national resource with appropriate care,” said Curiosity Project Manager Pete Theisinger of JPL. “Sixteen days in, we are making excellent progress.”

The science team has begun pointing instruments on the rover’s mast for investigating specific targets of interest near and far. The Chemistry and Camera (ChemCam) instrument used a laser and spectrometers this week to examine the composition of rocks exposed when the spacecraft’s landing engines blew away several inches of overlying material.

The instrument’s principal investigator, Roger Weins of Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, reported that measurements made on the rocks in this scoured-out feature called Goulburn suggest a basaltic composition. “These may be pieces of basalt within a sedimentary deposit,” Weins said.

Curiosity began a two-year prime mission on Mars when the Mars Science Laboratory spacecraft delivered the car-size rover to its landing target inside Gale Crater on August 5 PDT (August 6 EDT). The mission will use 10 science instruments on the rover to assess whether the area has ever offered environmental conditions favorable for microbial life.

In a career spanning more than 70 years, Ray Bradbury inspired generations of readers to dream, think and create. A prolific author of hundreds of short stories and nearly to 50 books, as well as numerous poems, essays, operas, plays, teleplays, and screenplays, Bradbury was one of the most celebrated writers of our time.

His groundbreaking works include “Fahrenheit 451,” “The Martian Chronicles,” “The Illustrated Man,” “Dandelion Wine,” and “Something Wicked This Way Comes.” He wrote the screenplay for John Huston’s classic film adaptation of “Moby Dick,” and was nominated for an Academy Award. He adapted 65 of his stories for television’s “The Ray Bradbury Theater,” and won an Emmy for his teleplay of “The Halloween Tree.”

JPL manages the Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The rover was designed, developed and assembled at JPL.

More information about Curiosity is online at: http://www.nasa.gov/msl

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On April 23 at Seattle’s Museum of Flight, Planetary Resources, Inc. announced and revealed their plans to search for and mine asteroids for their precious metals and water. With this mission, its members hope to provide more resources for the Earth and humans and reduce the cost of space travel. Billions to trillions of dollars can be contributed to the global gross domestic profit.

As for a more intrinsic motivation, Planetary Resources also hopes to advance human exploration in space.

The money and means largely come from the founders and backers of the group, which include Google co-founder and CEO Larry Page, Eric Anderson (who founded Space Adventures, which arranged space flights for millionaires) Ross Perot Jr. (the chairman of the Board of Perot Systems), Charles Simonyi (who was a part of the team that devised Microsoft Office Suite), filmmaker James Cameron, and Peter Diamandis (founder and chairman of the X Prize Foundation).

Asteroids are space junk – leftovers from when the planets in our solar system fully formed. Their sizes range from several meters to over one thousand kilometers across. Composition varies, though they are mostly made of metals, some of which are present on Earth (“common” ones such as iron and nickel) and some of which are rare on our planet (platinum, for example.) Some asteroids consist of a significant amount of frozen water along with metals.

“Everything we hold of value on Earth — metals, minerals, energy, water, real estate — are literally in near-infinite quantities in space,” Diamandis tells ABC News.

To conserve time, money, and fuel, Planetary Resources plans to mine asteroids near Earth. Thousands possibly float nearby – many of them too small to be detected. Most that will be mined would be more reachable than the Moon since Earth’s gravitational tends to capture smaller space objects, including asteroids.

The mission is divided into sections. Before getting straight to the mining, the group will first build a low-orbiting telescope that will be able to sieve out the asteroids that show the most promise for harvesting (ten percent of over a thousand). The approximate launch date has not yet determined.

Then comes the actual mining. Subsequent to finding the asteroids via telescope, the group will launch space probes containing unmanned robots, which will be sent out by rocket boosters built by private American companies, by the Russians, or by any other source willing to build them for affordable prices.

As Phillip Plait in writes in his blog “Bad Astronomy,” volatiles (oxygen, nitrogen, and water) will be garnered primarily for the sake of having additional resources. The water will either be converted into hydrogen for rocket fuel and oxygen, or it can be broken down to its basic elements for easier and cheaper transport.

After the volatiles, the robots will mine for the precious metals: platinum, palladium, iridium, and ruthenium, and others, all of which are difficult to access on Earth and only exist on the planet because of impacts from asteroids.

“When the availability of these metals increase[s], the cost will reduce on everything including defibrillators, hand-held devices, TV and computer monitors, catalysts,” Diamandis continues. “And with the abundance of these metals, we’ll be able to use them in mass production, like in automotive fuel cells.”

To further save costs, the robots will have the option of storing the metals and water in supply depots in space instead of bringing to resources back to Earth straight away.

Is Planetary Resources’ plan is completely ludicrous? Not really. Mining asteroids is not is not a novel concept. Plait continues writes that he thinks “getting to the asteroids will do just fine,” and to American astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson, who recently appeared on the Daily Show, the idea is “not bulls#*t.”

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Ukrainian Cabinet of Ministers adopted the 2012 plan of immediate measures concerning the country’s integration to the European Union. The document deals with internal reform issues (the likes of gas transporting system modernization, institutional reform in Ukraine, and hosting EURO 2012), as well as questions of deepening Ukraine-EU ties: visa liberalization, cooperation with EU police and justice offices, expanding trade cooperation, etc.

Besides the listed domestic reforms, the document stipulates measures to enhance regional development of the country, restructuring of the national gas managing company Naftogaz, as well as preparations to the Association Agreement implementation.

Ukraine also plans to enhance cooperation with the EU in the areas of nuclear safety, research and technology, defense, space exploration. Additionally, the new document sets the agenda for creating the common airspace with the EU. According to the plan, Ukraine intends to join the European Network of Transmission System Operators for Electricity.

Ukraine and the EU share a 1,391 kilometer long border and have established close cooperation in a number of areas. Ukraine is EU’s strategic gas transit partner. Its gas transporting system services 70% of the Russian gas export to Europe. The EU is one of Ukraine’s key trade partners with the trade volume in 2011 constituting USD 44 billion and demonstrating a 36% growth.

European integration has been a long-term foreign policy goal for Ukraine. The country began negotiations with the EU in 1999. Various officials of the EU member states, including Czech Republic, Finland, and Lithuania, backed Ukraine’s European ambition.
By 2007 the sides agreed to eventually sign the Association Agreement. After 21 rounds of negotiations over the Association Agreement, Ukraine and the EU finalized the negotiating process on December 19, 2011.

The Association Agreement will regulate political cooperation of the partners, as well as introduce the Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Area between Ukraine and the EU. Initialing of the political and, partly, economical sections of the document took place in Brussels on March 30, 2012.

Currently the sides are working on the technical aspects of the document preparation for signing and further ratification. Meanwhile, the President of Ukraine Viktor Yanukovych stated that Ukraine perceived the Association Agreement as comprehensive program of reforms.

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On February 27, the team of astronomers involved with NASA’s spacecraft Kepler published their most recent catalog of exoplanets (short for extrasolar planets, which are planets beyond our solar system) that Kepler has detected.

Data from the newest catalog is cumulative and includes information from the two catalogues created in June 2010 and February 2011. As of now, the total number of exoplanets Kepler has detected is 2,321, which orbit 1,790 stars. A full 93% are smaller than Neptune, the smallest of the gas giants in the solar system. Over 200 are Earth-sized and more than 900 are smaller than twice the size of the Earth’s diameter. There are 46 exoplanets located in the habitable zone, 10 of which are Earth-sized.

“With each new catalog release a clear progression toward smaller planets at longer orbital periods is emerging,” Natalie Batalha, Kepler deputy science team lead at San Jose State University in California, states in NASA’s press release. “This suggests that Earth-size planets in the habitable zone are forthcoming if, indeed, such planets are abundant.”

Furthermore, the percent for more than one planet orbiting a star has increased to 20 percent from last year’s 17 percent (many other planets are rogue, unattached to a parent star, twirling alone in space). More and detailed statistics can be found here.

Three methods can be utilized to find exoplanets: gravitational lensing, radial-velocity, and transiting. Kepler largely uses the latter method, using the software Transiting Planet Search (TPS) pipeline module, because it has proven to produce more results compared to the former two. Transiting works as thus: one measures a star’s periodic drop in brightness due to an object – in the most hopeful scenario, a planet – passing in front of the star.

Sifting through 150,000 stars, Kepler detected around 5,000 transit signals, through which the spacecraft had more to sort. One can easily misidentify an object to be an exoplanet when using the transiting method; one may instead find a binary star system, which contains two stars that orbit and eclipse one another. To confirm its detection of a planet, Kepler has to record the transit at least three times.

Kepler was launched in mid-2009 to find Earth-like exoplanets that are able to sustain water and life. These planets would have to be located in the habitable zone, an area in which a planet must orbit a star in order for liquid water to exist on its surface. Kepler goes about attempting to detect exoplanets by looking at their parent stars first, largely searching for G-type stars, or Sun-like stars (or at least stars a part of the Main Sequence), which astronomers believe to be ideal parent stars.

For much of the time Kepler began exploring, it mostly detected gas giants tens of times larger than Jupiter. As the spacecraft endured, it began, recently, to find numerous smaller rocky planets. Soon after, astronomers working with Kepler have calculated that there are more of these kinds of planets than there are gas giants.

Kepler’s latest milestone includes Kepler-20e and Kepler-20f, which were detected this January and are the first Earth-sized planets known to exist. Another milestone occurred in December 2011, when Kepler discovered super-Earth Kepler-22b, the first known exoplanet in the habitable zone.

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A team of astronomers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA), using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, has discovered a “waterworld” planet beyond the solar system.

This exoplanet (i.e. extrasolar planet), dubbed GJ1214b, is located in the constellation Opphiuchus, 40 light-years away from the Earth. It is 2.7 times the size of the Earth and roughly seven times Earth’s weight. At a distance of 1.3 million miles, the watery exoplanet orbits a red dwarf every 38 hours and has a surface temperature of 450º F (230º C).

GJ1214B was first discovered in 2009 by a team of astronomers, led by David Charbonneau of CfA, with the groudbased project MEarth (pronounced “mirth”). Charbonneau and his team were able to detect GJ2124b through transiting, a widely-used method used to search for exoplanets in which one looks to see if a star’s light slightly drops periodically. If it does, a planetary body has traveled in front of the star.

A year later, in 2010, astrophysicist Jacob Bean and his colleagues (also working at CfA) learned that GJ1214b’s atmosphere was chiefly composed of gaseous water. And in 2012, the current group of astronomers working at CfA has confirmed that GJ1214b is indeed veiled in a watery haze.

“GJ1214b is like no planet we know of,” Zachary Berta – an astronomer who is the head of the team – states in CfA’s press release.

Using the parent star’s light, he and his colleagues learned which gases comprise the larger exoplanet’s atmosphere, through which the light passed. With that knowledge, they concluded the GJ1214b and its atmosphere were not mostly made of water, but also hazy – and quite steamy.

The team of was also able to calculate the density of GJ1214b, knowing its size and mass: 2g/cm3. In comparison, Earth’s density = 5.5 g/cm3, and water on Earth 1 gm/cm3. GJ1214b’s larger density suggests that it has more water and less solid material.

“The high temperatures and high pressures would form exotic materials like ‘hot ice’ or ‘superfluid water’ – substances that are completely alien to our everyday experience,” Berta explains. Furthermore, GJ1214b cannot harbor any bodies of liquid water due its temperature and proximity to its parent star.

He and his colleagues utilized Hubble to measure GJ1214b’s light spectrum. The spectrum is apparently not restricted to any particular wavelengths, which indicates and further proves the state of the atmosphere. The team is also currently attempting to study the exoplanet’s sunsets through infrared using the Hubble; they can see through the atmosphere more easily with infrared than if they used visible light, which is shorter in wavelength and, hence, cannot traverse thick mediums readily.

According to CfA, theorists have predicted GJ1214b’s formation:

“GJ1214b formed farther out from its star, where water ice was plentiful, and migrated inward early in the system’s history. In the process, it would have passed through the star’s habitable zone. How long it lingered there is unknown.”

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NASA (the National Aeronautics and Space Administration) may decide to withdraw from the ExoMars Program due to hefty budget cuts.

Recently, President Barack Obama filled out the 2013 Federal Budget Request, which will be released today. NASA received a massive blow to its budget, prompting its administrators to debate which programs should be cut. A decision weighed between exploring the planets in our solar system or adventuring out into the cosmos. In the end, several programs for planets were cut. Mars was hit the most. According to Associated Press, the current budget for Mars missions is $518.7 million, and more than $200 million has been slashed.

“To me, it’s totally irrational and unjustified,” Edward Weiler, who is formerly NASA’s associate administrator for science, says to MSNBS.com. Weiler quit because he, according to MSNBC, tried to prevent Mars from being in the pool for the cuts. “We are the only country on this planet that has the demonstrated ability to land on another planet, namely Mars. It is a national prestige issue.”

The ExoMars Program is a collaboration of NASA and the ESA (European Space Agency). Their goal, according to the website, is to “search for evidence of past and present life on Mars.” Two missions have been planned thus far. The first, led by the ESA, is to send a satellite launched by NASA to Mars in 2016 that will search for traces of methane in the atmosphere.

The second plans to send, in 2018, two rovers (one American and one European), which will drill into the red planet’s surface. This mission will be both led and launched by NASA, who will have provided the materials and technical attributes. NASA promised to provide $1.4 billion for both missions.

If NASA truly withdraws, ESA will look to involve Roscosmos, the Russian Federal Space Agency. They worry, however, that Roscosmos does not have the same technical skills and assets as NASA. Furthermore, ESA would have to deal with the fact that the program will have lost a large amount of money – the missions would be hindered and delayed.

NASA has been in a bind with costs, using much their budget, for example, to replace the $8 billion James Webb Space Telescope with their current successful Hubble Space Telescope. The James Webb Space Telescope, which was originally estimated to cost $3 billion, would be more than a hundred times powerful than Hubble.

“Even in these times of fiscal restraint, President Obama has laid out an ambitious plan of exploration and discovery for NASA that includes robotic missions to Mars as well as the ultimate goal of a human mission,” NASA HQ in Washington tells BBC. “It would not be appropriate to comment on specifics of the president’s budget before it is released on 13 February.”

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On February 2, a team of astronomers detected an exoplanet (short for extrasolar planet) located in the habitable zone, a slim area in which a planet must be located, so that it is not too close nor too far away from the star it orbits, thus having a surface temperature that can sustain liquid. This newly discovered exoplanet may be able to sustain water and even life.

Using data from the European Southern Observatory, the W.M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii, and the Carnegie Planet Finder Spectograph at the Magellan II Telescope in Chile, the astronomers – from the University of California in Santa Cruz and the private research organization Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, DC – found the exoplanet through discerning the gravitational tug it and its parent star impose on each other. The system lies 22 light-years away in the constellation Scorpius.

“This is basically our next-door neighbor,” Steven Vogt tells Space.com. Vogt, one of the members of the team, is an astronomer at the University of California. “It’s very nearby. There are only about 100 stars closer to us than this one.”

“We’ve been explicitly focusing on very nearby stars,” he adds, “because with today’s technology, we could send a robotic probe out there, and within a few hundred years, it could be sending back picture postcards.”

The star, dubbed GJ 667C, is a part of a triple star system. Unlike its companion stars, which are orange K dwarfs, GJ 667C is an M-class dwarf: it is much smaller and less luminous than the Sun and emits infrared light, which is less intense in light and temperature. GJ 667C’s composition is very different from that of the Sun’s, lacking elements heavier than hydrogen and helium such as carbon, iron, and silicon that are needed to form planets.

“We shouldn’t have really expected this star to be a likely case for harboring planets,” says Vogt.

The exoplanet, named GJ 667Cc, is a super-Earth, roughly 4.5 times the size of the Earth. Because of the absence of heavy elements, much of GJ 667Cc’s mass comes from ice and gas. The orbital period of GJ 667Cc measures 28 days, which would seem dauntingly close to us compared to the Earth’s orbital period.

A planet that takes the same amount of time to orbit the Sun (for instance) would roast; however, GJ 667C’s weak temperature and light, and the fact that GJ 667Cc receives 10 percent of the light the Earth receives from the Sun, counterbalance the closeness of the exoplanet, creating a comfortable region in which to dwell.

Furthermore, GJ 667Cc is in the right spot to absorb the same amount of energy that the Earth absorbs from the Sun to have an atmosphere. In the Carnegie Institution for Science press release, Guillem Anglada-Escudé – co-leader of the study and lead writer of the team’s paper that will soon be published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters – states, “This planet is the new best candidate to support liquid water and, perhaps, life as we know it.”

GJ 667Cc has a sibling, GJ 667Cb, which is around the size of the Earth. Unlike GJ 667Cc, GJ 667Cb has a much smaller orbital period. Hence, it is too close and has too high a temperature to sustain liquid.

Only one other exoplanet located in the habitable zone has been discovered before, Kepler-22b, which was detected by the NASA spacecraft Kepler on December 5, 2011. Astronomers believe that Kepler-22b, which is 2.4 times the Earth’s size, may also maintain water and life.

Image Courtesy of  http://www.esa.int

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This week, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA) spacecraft, Kepler, detected eleven planetary systems, which, overall, contain 26 new exoplanets (short for extrasolar planets, which exist beyond out solar system). Located in the Lyra and Cygnus constellations, each system contains two to five planets. The systems have been dubbed Kepler-23, Kepler-24, Kepler-25, Kepler-26, Kepler-27, Kepler-28, Kepler-29, Kepler-30, Kepler-31, Kepler-32, and Kepler-33.

The sizes of the exoplanets range from 1.5 to 5 times the size of Earth to larger than Jupiter. All of them orbit their parent stars closely; none of them lie in the habitable zone, an area in which a planet is not too close or too far away from a star so that it can sustain water and life. Each of their orbits is closer than that of Venus. The farthest exoplanet has years that last fewer than 200 days and the surface temperature of hundreds of degrees.

Kepler primarily detects planets through a process known as transiting, in which it measures a star’s periodic change in brightness generated by a planet crossing its parent star, causing the star’s light to drop a bit in brightness.

The NASA spacecraft was able to find these newer exoplanets by means of measuring Transit Timing Variations (TTVs). With this method, Kepler calculates changes in the acceleration of planets due to the gravitational pull on one another from being so close together. TTVs help Kepler find the more distant – hence fainter – star systems.

“Prior to the Kepler mission, we knew of perhaps 500 exoplanets across the whole sky,” said Doug Hudgins, Kepler program scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington, in the press release on NASA’s Kepler website.

“Now,” Hudgins continues, “in just two years staring at a patch of sky not much bigger than your fist, Kepler has discovered more than 60 planets and more than 2,300 planet candidates. This tells us that our galaxy is positively loaded with planets of all sizes and orbits.”

Kepler has been in space for nearly three years. Its mission is to search for Earth-like exoplanets that orbit stars in the habitable zone. Ever since its launch in March 2009, Kepler has made numerous momentous findings, especially in the last couple of months.

On December 5, the spacecraft detected Kepler-22b, the first planet to be found in a habitable zone, and on December 20, it discovered the first two Earth-sized exoplanets, Kepler-20e and Kepler-20f. Kepler’s most recent significant detection occurred earlier this month: exoplanets KOI-961.01, KOI-961.02, and KOI-961.03, the tiniest exoplanets thus far.

Based on the diversity of the types of exoplanets, astronomers believe they will attain a better understanding of how planets form.

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The Russian space probe Phobos-Grunt crashed into the Earth on Sunday, January 15. Several space industry officials from Russia, including those involved with the mission, believe that radiation from a US radar may have accidentally caused the probe to fail.

When Phobos-Grunt was launched on November 9th, it became stranded in orbit on the same day due to a propulsion malfunction. After two months, the probe plummeted back to the Earth and fell in areas of the Pacific Ocean near Chile and Brazil.

Russian scientists predicted Phobos-Grunt would break into 20-30 fragments upon reentering the atmosphere. The probe weighed 13.5 metric tons, with an additional 1.1 metric tons of toxic fuel, but it is not the heaviest object to hurtle into the Earth – nearly one hundred tons of man-made objects and natural space debris crash every year. Furthermore, the toxic fuel the Phobos-Grunt contained burned up in the atmosphere.

Opinions as to what caused Phobos-Grunt to fail vary and even contradict one another.

“Experts do not rule out that the probe could have accidentally come under the impact of emissions [from a U.S. radar stationed on the Marshall Islands], whose megawatt impulse triggered the malfunctioning of on-board electronics,” stated an anonymous source provided by an article on Izvestia Daily.

Vladimir Popovkin, head of the Russian space agency Roscosmos, agrees that the US radar might have been the cause of Phobos-Grunt’s failure. “I don’t want to make any accusations, but at present there are powerful technologies that can impact spacecraft, and their usage cannot be ruled out,” he insists in an article from Ria Novosti.

However, Viktor Savorsky, a researcher at the Russian Academy of Sciences Institute of Radio Technology and Electronics, thinks otherwise of Phobos-Grunt. “The electronic equipment [of spacecraft] is usually protected very well against radiation and sheltered against external fields,” he says in the same article.

Alexander Zakharov, a specialist at the Space Research Institute, which developed Phobos-Grunt, firmly says the idea of radar being so powerful as to wipe out a probe hundreds of miles away is “contrived” and “exotic.”

“I simply think that is disingenuous,” Zakharov says in another article from Izvestia Daily. “It is convenient to find the cause of the failure on the outside. The spacecraft itself should be examined first. There are problems there.”

Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin believes it to be too soon for conclusions. He considers the possibility that the US radar may have caused the failure, but also thinks the probe itself may be at fault.

Scientists from Russia will check to see if the US radar really caused Phobos-Grunt to fail through performing an experiment in which a Phobos-Grunt-like model will be exposed to similar radiation from the radar. The investigation team will be lead by Yury Koptev, former head of Roscosmos.

Phobos-Grunt is Russia’s most ambitious and expensive space project since Soviet times, costing $170 million. Its mission was to travel to the Martian moon Phobos and collect soil samples, which Russian scientists had hoped would shed light on the origin of the solar system.

In the past, nearly seventy missions of Russian space probes bent on traveling to Mars have failed, the most recent occurring in 1996 when Mars-96 suffered from engine failure.

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Working with the Palomar Observatory near San Diego and the W.M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii and using NASA’s spacecraft Kepler, astronomers from the California Institute of Technology have found three teeny, rocky, extrasolar planets (otherwise known as exoplanets, which lie beyond our solar system).

NASA launched Kepler in 2009 to search for Earth-like planets that orbit stars in the habitable zone, a region colloquially called the “Goldilocks Zone”, in which a planet must not be too close or too far from a star, so that its temperature would be just right to be habitable for life. Kepler uses a method called transiting to accomplish its mission: it sees if any stars have slight dips in brightness caused by a planet, which eventually eclipses its parent star sometime during its orbit.

The freshly discovered planetary system’s star is named KOI-961 (KOI is an acronym for Kepler Object in Question). Approximately 130 light-years from the Earth, KOI-961 is a red dwarf – a pipsqueak of a star compared to the Sun, which is six times larger. KOI-961 is similar to a nearby star, Barnard’s Star, which is also a red dwarf. Astronomers used information about Barnard’s Star to determine KOI-961′s characteristics, which were then used to calculate its companion planets’ sizes.

The planets’ names are KOI-961.01, KOI-961.02, and KOI-961.03 and have the radii of 0.78, 0.73, and 0.57 times that of the Earth, respectively. The smallest, KOI-961.03, is about the size of Mars, and the other two are about the size of Venus. All three do not lie in habitable zones; they orbit their parent star too closely, and one year equals two days.

Due to their incredibly close orbits, they are too hot to form liquid, let alone for life to thrive. Temperatures are hundreds of degrees, with the closest, KOI-961.01, having a surface temperature of nearly 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit (500°C).

This planetary system is the tiniest known to astronomers. John Johnson, assistant professor of astronomy at Caltech and co-author of the team’s paper, states in the Caltech press release, “It’s actually more similar to Jupiter and its moons in scale than any other planetary system. The discovery is further proof of the diversity of planetary systems in our galaxy.”

Red dwarfs are the most common type of star in our home galaxy, the Milky Way, making up eight out of every ten stars. Because of their ubiquity, Kepler may find more planetary systems with red dwarfs as parent stars. “That boosts the chances of other life being in the universe – that’s the ultimate result here,” Johnson says.

In the past, Kepler has found numerous gas giants around the sizes of Jupiter and Neptune. Its most recent discoveries occurred in December 2011, when it detected Kepler-22b, the first planet discovered to orbit in the habitable zone, and Kepler-20e and Kepler-20f, the first Earth-sized exoplanets detected.

The more planets Kepler detects nowadays, the more they become smaller and rockier, it seems. Kepler’s last two discoveries increases the probability that there may be more rocky exoplanets than astronomers thought, thereby, boosting the chance of the existence of extraterrestrial life.

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In 2009, NASA launched Kepler to search for planets outside the solar system – called extrasolar planets, or exoplanets – that are Earth-sized and have a chance of harboring life. As of December 2011, the spacecraft has discovered 2,326 exoplanets, over a hundred of which are likely candidates to meet the requirements.

A team of astronomers at NASA decided in early January to give Kepler an additional mission of hunting for extrasolar moons, or exomoons. The team believes in the potential existence of exomoons. Natural satellites only survive half the time when they and their companion planets are still undergoing evolution, though the many moons in our solar system increase the possibility.

With this new mission, titled Hunt of Exomoons with Kepler (HEK), Kepler may find life on these moons as well as on exoplanets and help astronomers understand planetary evolution and the formation of natural satellites. Kepler will first look at the exoplanets cataloged thus far to see if any of them have any such natural satellites. The exomoons would have to be similar in size, or larger, than our Moon because they would be easiest for the spacecraft to detect.

It is also possible that exomoons are capable of harboring life. In our solar system, Jupiter’s Europa and Saturn’s Enceladus have liquid water beneath their surfaces. It is not known for sure if these two large moons contain life, though the presence of water heightens the probability as well as the probability that exomoons may be habitable.

Kepler will attempt to search for exomoons through two means: dynamical effects and eclipses features. With dynamical effects, the spacecraft would observe and measure the gravitational effect between the exoplanet and the exomoon (i.e. how much they tug on each other).

The amount of gravitational effects on the two bodies would determine whether or not the system would be a planet-moon system or a binary-planet system (it would be easy for the former to be mistaken with the latter). With eclipse features, Kepler would be on the lookout for solar and lunar eclipses, involving the exomoon, its companion planet, and their star. Kepler would see if the exomoon may make subtle changes in a star’s brightness through eclipsing the star, which would drop a bit in brightness.

Once Kepler finds an exomoon, it would be able to determine its size and mass based on the gravitational effect and eclipse features. Upon discovering the size and mass, it would then calculate the density. Thereafter, the exomoon’s composition can be determined, giving insight as to how to the exomoon formed and, ultimately, revealing the process of planetary evolution.

“Extrasolar moons represent an outstanding challenge in modern observational astronomy,” writes head author David Kipping in the team’s paper. Kipping,  a member of the team at NASA, is an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

“Their detection and study would yield a revolution in the understanding of planet/moon formation and evolution, but perhaps most provocatively, they could be frequent seats for life in the Galaxy.”

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Earlier this month, NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) once again found groundbreaking evidence that water once existed on Mars. The rover, Opportunity, has discovered a long, thin vein of gypsum deposit, found on the edge of the crater, Endeavor.

In January 2004, NASA sent the twin rovers, Opportunity and Spirit, to Mars as a part of the Mars Exploration Rover Mission to find clues that water once existed. Opportunity and Spirit discovered gypsum to be as much of a common mineral on Mars as it is on Earth. Gypsum, which is used as drywall and as an ingredient for plaster, is found evaporated in sedimentary environments, particularly in saline water beds (or seawater) containing high amounts of dissolved calcium sulfate (CaSO₄).

Since their landing on Mars, the rovers found, in the northern sand dunes, numerous pieces of gypsum, which were blown by winds and, hence, mixed with other minerals and materials. These dunes are similar to the White Sands National Monument located in New Mexico, where the sands are comprised of gypsum crystals. This discovery is one of the few that proves that water existed on Mars, but from where the gypsum originates baffles scientists.

Sometime in early 2010, Spirit had discontinued its mission due to being stuck and its eventual inability to communicate. Opportunity, on the other hand, has remained alive and active, and eventually found the gypsum deposit, slightly jutting out from the bedrock. The vein is approximately 2 cm wide and 50 cm long.

Although this discovery may seem redundant with the ones made in the past, it turns out that this strand of gypsum is more significant than the pieces found in dunes. Not only does it appear to have formed in place, but the deposit tells us that water once flowed through a crevice long ago.

“That can’t be said for other gypsum seen on Mars or for other water-related minerals Opportunity has found,” remarks Steve Squyres, a planetary scientist at Cornell University. “It’s not uncommon on Earth, but on Mars, it’s the kind of thing that makes geologists jump out of their chairs.”

Opportunity and Spirit have analyzed most Martian areas to be acidic – and definitely not suitable for life. However, the spot in which the gypsum deposit was found does contain the substances that cause acidity. Thus, the water may have been more neutral. Not only is the vein a sure sign that Mars once did have water, it also proves that the red and dusty planet may have been more habitable than we thought.

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Earlier this week, the spacecraft, Kepler, discovered two exoplanets around the size of the earth – the first of their kind – orbiting a sun-like star. Named Kepler-20e and Kepler-20f, these exoplanets are a part of the star system, Kepler-20, which lies 950 light years away from Earth near the constellation, Lyra.

“This discovery demonstrates for the first time that Earth-size planets exist around other stars and that we are able to detect them,” says Dr. Francois Fressin, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Launched in 2009, Kepler is a space telescope built and sent by NASA to detect Earth-like exoplanets (also known as extrasolar planets, which are planets that exist outside our solar system) orbiting stars in habitable zones. Its most recent, significant discovery occurred in early December, when it detected the Neptune-sized Kepler-22b, the first of its kind that has been seen orbiting in the “Goldilocks zone” and that might possibly have water and life.

Kepler took a step closer in accomplishing its mission when it detected Kepler-20, Kepler-20e, and Kepler-20f. Kepler-20 is similar to the sun, in that it is a G-type star. It is yellowish, though a bit smaller and cooler. The star contains five planets in total, all of which orbit it closer than Mercury orbits the sun. The three other planets are gas giants, which are about the size of Neptune, and each planet orbits alternating in size.

These newly discovered exoplanets are only Earth-like in their sizes and rocky composition. Kepler-20e orbits its star every 6.1 days, and its temperature is 1400° F. Its diameter, 6900 miles, is 0.87 times the diameter of the Earth’s. Kepler-20f has an orbit of 19.6 days. It has the temperature of 800° F, and it is 1.03 times Earth’s diameter, being 8,200 miles.

Because of their close orbits and high temperatures, these two exoplanets are not able to sustain water, let alone life. For them to have water and life, they have to lie in the “Goldilocks zone,” or the habitable zone, in which a planet cannot be too close or too far (hence, too hot or too cold) from the star it orbits.

Ever since its launch in 2009, Kepler has been detecting hundreds of exoplanets, many of which are not Earth-like, being hostile and sometimes lonely, not orbiting any stars. With its most recent detection of Kepler-22b and of Kepler-20′s two Earth-like planets, Kepler has reached a new landmark, not just in its journey, but in our knowledge of the various kinds of planets that exist in the observable universe.

“This could be an important milestone,” Dr. Fressin states. “I think 10 years, or maybe even 100 years, from now people will look back and ask when was the first Earth-sized planet found. It is very exciting.”

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