Space & Astronomy

NASA's Mars rover Curiosity has used the drill attached to its robotic arm to drill a second time, this time collecting a powdered sample from the interior of a rock called "Cumberland".

The space agency's plans call for portions of the sample to be delivered to laboratory instruments inside the rover in the coming days. This is just the second time that a sample has been collected from inside a rock on the Red Planet.

The first time Curiosity drilled and collected a sample of powdered rock was three months ago when it drilled a target known as "John Klein." Cumberland resembles John Klein, and lies about nine feet further west. Both Cumberland and John Klein are within a shallow depression known as Yellowknife Bay.

Curiosity drilled the 2.6-inch deep hole into Cumberland on May 19.

An unusually large asteroid measuring 1.7 miles wide will be zooming pass the Earth later this month. According to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Asteroid 1998 QE2 will get no closer than 3.6 million miles, which is 15 times the distance between us and the moon, however due to its size, stargazers are in for a treat on May 31.

NASA also says that anyone with a 230-foot or larger radar telescope will be able to see the asteroid, which is about the size of nine cruise ships. Discovered in 1998, QE2 will not come this close again for two centuries.

NASA's search for planets where life could exist outside of our solar system has come to a sudden, unexpected halt, as the space agency's planet-hunting telescope Kepler is now broken. If engineers are unable to find a fix, it could mean an end to the $600 million mission's search.

NASA wasn't ready to call it quits just let. NASA sciences chief John Grunsfeld commented:

"I wouldn't call Kepler down-and-out just yet."

Kepler has discovered numerous planets, but to date only two are the best candidates for habitable planets.

According NASA, Kepler lost the second of four wheels that controls its orientation in space. With just two working wheels left, it is unable to point at starts with the same precision.

Kepler is currently orbiting the sun at about 40 million miles from Earth. It is too far away to send astronauts out on a repair mission, so over the next few weeks, Earth-based engineers will attempt to restart Kepler's faulty wheel or find a workaround.

The commercial spaceflight company Virgin Galactic announced this week that it is hiring two veteran pilots to bring space tourists to new heights above Earth.

The new hires include retired U.S. Air Force Lt. Col. Michael Massuci and former NASA space shuttle commander Frederick Sturckow, who will work out of the company's Mojave, Calif., location to conduct flight training and testing with the suborbital SpaceShipTwo and its mothership, WhiteKnightTwo.

Sarah Brightman, a classically trained singer and actress, says that she is planning to become the first recording artist to venture into space and is setting her sights on a trip to the International Space Station.

Brightman, 52, revealed that she has wanted to explore space ever since 1969 when she was a little girl watching the historic Apollo 11 landing on the moon on her television. She said:

"I was very lucky and privileged to be living in that time to see that actually happen on a black-and-white TV screen and it changed many of us. I don't think there's been anything to date that was like that."

Brightman says that since that moment, she's wanted to go to space and now is making plans for it to become reality. She added:

"It looks as if a special journey into space will be happening for me in a couple of years."

The strange Martian mountain known as Mount Sharp, which is the ultimate destination of NASA's Curiosity rover, was likely built primarily by wind rather than water, according to a new study.

Many scientists have postulated that the 3.4-mile high mountain formed primarily from layers of lakebed silt, which was one of the big reasons that the mountain was chose as the rover's ultimate destination. The new research, however, holds that wind likely did most of the building of Mount Sharp.

Study co-author Kevin Lewis of Princeton University said in a statement:

"Our work doesn't preclude the existence of lakes in Gale Crater, but suggests that the bulk of the material in Mount Sharp was deposited largely by the wind."

Curiosity landed inside the 96-mile-wide crater in August 2012, kicking off a two-year mission to research Mars' past and present potential to host microbial life. The rover has already accomplished its main goal of finding that a spot near the landing site known as Yellowknife Bay was once capable of supporting life billions of years ago Curiosity, however, still needs to make its trek to the base of Mount Sharp - a 6-mile journey to the rover's main science target.

Observations from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbitor (MRO) have suggested that the mountain's foothills were exposed to liquid water some time in the past. For the new study, researchers used other MRO observations to come up with the new wind-based theory of Mount Sharp's formation, determining that the mound's layers are not flat-lying stacks that would be expected in lakebed deposits. Instead, they fan outwards in an odd radial pattern from the mountain's center, which is consistent with results from the researchers' computer model that suggested that wind blowing down Gale's slopes could build a mound in the crater's center while at the same time leaving areas near the rim bare.

NASA has sent rovers to Mars to explore and determine if there is or ever was life on the Red Planet, but there are also scientists here on Earth attempting to solve the same mystery. A team of scientists, including a Michigan State University professor, has examined a meteorite that formed on Mars more than a billion years ago.

MSU geological sciences professor Michael Velbel says that one of the problems is that most meteorites that originated on Mars and landed on Earth arrived so long ago that they now have characteristics that tell of their time on Earth, which obscures any clues that they may offer about their time on Mars. He added:

"These meteorites contain water-related mineral and chemical signatures that can signify habitable conditions. The trouble is by the time most of these meteorites have been lying around on Earth they pick up signatures that look just like habitable environments, because they are. Earth, obviously, is habitable. If we could somehow prove the signature on the meteorite was from before it came to Earth, that would be telling us about Mars."

The researchers found mineral and chemical signatures on the rocks that indicate terrestrial weathering, or changes that occurred on Earth.

NASA terminated the Space Shuttle program in 2011, but have still been sending astronauts to the International Space Station and back, however the astronauts have been going to Russia to catch rides on a Soyuz rocket. Of course this isn't exactly the situation that NASA wants, and the space program plans to launch manned space flights in the U.S. again, but the timing has been delayed into 2017.

To replace the space shuttle, NASA plans to pay private space companies like SpaceX to send astronauts to the ISS. Due to government budget cuts, however, the original 2015 date when we'd first see this start happening has gotten delayed by two years. That means, NASA won't be able to send up astronauts to the ISS from the U.S. until 2017. In the meantime, NASA has opted to pay the Roscosmos Space Agency $424 million to extend their contract through 2017.

NASA Administrator Charles Bolden commented:

“...It is unacceptable that we don’t currently have an American capability to launch our own astronauts.”

Bolden and NASA are calling upon Congress to approve President Barack Obama's budget request of $821 million for NASA, warning that there will be additional delays beyond 2017 to launch astronauts from the U.S.

NASA's Cassini probe has captured spectacular new images while orbiting Saturn that are the most detailed views ever of a massive hurricane that is churning around the planet's north pole.

The images and video of the hurricane on Saturn show that the storm's eye is 1,250 miles wide, which is about 20 times larger than typical hurricane eyes here on Earth. The ringed planet's hurricane is also much more powerful than those found on Earth, with winds at its outer edge whipping around at 330mph.

Cassini imaging team member Andrew Ingersoll of Caltech in Pasadena commented:

"We did a double take when we saw this vortex because it looks so much like a hurricane on Earth. But there it is at Saturn, on a much larger scale, and it is somehow getting by on the small amounts of water vapor in Saturn's hydrogen atmosphere."

Saturn's hurricane, however, is not exactly like those on Earth and swirls inside of a mysterious six-sided vortex. Also unlike hurricanes on Earth which tend to drift northward as the planet rotates, the Saturn superstorm and is hexagonal vortex have been hanging around the north pole for awhile.

Kunio Sayanagi, another member of the Cassini imaging team at Hampton University in Hampton, Va., noted:

"The polar hurricane has nowhere else to go, and that's likely why it's stuck at the pole."

A privately backed asteroid mining company is preparing to put its plans into action soon, and will begin launching its first hardware into space by this time next year. Planetary Resources plans to launch a set of tiny "cubesats" to Earth's orbit in early 2014 to test out equipment for its first line of asteroid prospecting spacecraft.

Chris Voorhees, vice president of spacecraft development at Planetary Resources, said on Wednesday:

"Our belief and our philosophy is that the best testbed is space itself. Despite the fact that we're a deep-space company, we're going to use Earth orbit as much as possible. For us, it's a valuable learning experience, and that's what we plan on doing one year hence."

The tiny cubesats that will be launched in 2014 measure 12 inches long by 4 inches wide by 4 inches tall. The "Arkyd-3" satellites will test out technologies for the company's Arkyd-100 scouts, which Planetary Resources is hoping to launch to low-Earth orbit on asteroid-hunting missions in 2015.

Voorhees noted that the Arkyd-3 "is the testbed manifestation of our Arkyd-100 spacecraft. It just happens to be flying."

Other robotic probes beyond the 30-pound Arkyd-100 will investigate near-Earth asteroids up close. Eventually, they will mine suitable asteroids for resources including water and precious metals. The primary focus at first will be water, because it is the key enabler of off-Earth living.