[Thursday, February 1, 2007] A giant cloud half the size of the United States has been imaged on Saturn’s moon Titan by the Cassini spacecraft. The cloud may be responsible for the material that fills the lakes discovered last year by Cassini's radar instrument.

[Tuesday, February 6, 2007] According to a recent paper published by MBARI geologists and their colleagues, methane gas bubbling through seafloor sediments has created hundreds of low hills on the floor of the Arctic Ocean.

[Wednesday, February 7, 2007] A greenhouse gas that has become the bane of modern society may have saved Earth from completely freezing over early in the planet's history, according to the first detailed laboratory analysis of the world's oldest sedimentary rocks.

[Wednesday, February 7, 2007] The largest climate change in central North America since the age of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, a temperature drop of nearly 15 degrees F, is documented within the fossilized teeth of horses and other plant-eating mammals, a new study reveals.

[Friday, February 9, 2007] Astronomers have found that Enceladus, the sixth-largest moon of Saturn, is a "cosmic graffiti artist," pelting the surfaces of at least 11 other moons of Saturn with ice particles sprayed from its spewing surface geysers.

[Saturday, February 10, 2007] More than 200 extrasolar planets have been found so far, but our knowledge about those distant worlds is very limited. In most cases we haven't seen the planets; we only know they exist because of the effect they have on the star they orbit.

[Tuesday, February 13, 2007] Bill McKinnon, Ph.D., professor of earth and planetary sciences in Arts & Sciences, is making a big push for the planetary community to go to Europa, an intriguing moon of Jupiter, to search for the origins of life.

[Tuesday, February 13, 2007] "When I read the recent NASA press release on selections for future Mars missions and studies, I was struck by the contribution the Astrobiology Program had made to the development of the proposed investigations."

[Thursday, February 15, 2007] Astronomers have collected and analyzed a long-term set of activity and brightness measurements of a "solar twin" 18 Scorpii which exhibits brightness changes over the course of its activity cycle that are nearly identical to the Sun's.

[Thursday, February 15, 2007] Liquid or gas flowed through cracks penetrating underground rock on ancient Mars, according to a report based on observations by Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. These fluids may have produced conditions to support possible habitats for microbial life.

[Friday, February 16, 2007] Hunting for traces of life on Mars calls for two radically different strategies. Of the two, with today's exploration technology, we can most easily look for evidence for past life, preserved as fossil "biosignatures" in old rocks.

[Friday, February 16, 2007] Astronomers are scheduled to announce new findings about planets beyond our solar system at a media teleconference Wednesday, Feb. 21, at 10 a.m. PST. The findings are from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope.

[Friday, February 16, 2007] Reaching its first 100 days of operations, the powerful mineral-detector aboard the newest satellite to circle Mars is changing the way scientists view the history of water on the red planet.

[Monday, February 19, 2007] As NASA develops its next "flagship" mission to the outer solar system, Jupiter's moon Europa should be the target. Although Europa lies five times farther from the Sun than Earth, he notes it may offer a home for life.

[Tuesday, February 20, 2007] Astronauts on lunar and Mars missions will need to continually assess their radiation risk and exposure. The faculty and midshipmen at the USNA are developing a small device to do exactly that, as well as alert crews during high-radiation events.

[Tuesday, February 20, 2007] "We report on the measurement of the 7.5-14.7 micron spectrum for the transiting extrasolar giant planet HD 189733b using the Infrared Spectrograph on the Spitzer Space Telescope."

[Tuesday, February 20, 2007] "Of the over 200 known extrasolar planets, 14 exhibit transits in front of their parent stars as seen from Earth. Spectroscopic observations of the transiting planets can probe the physical conditions of their atmospheres."

[Tuesday, February 20, 2007] Solar X-ray and UV radiation (0.1-320 nm) received at Earth's surface is an important aspect of the circumstances under which life formed on Earth.

[Wednesday, February 21, 2007] NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has captured for the first time enough light from planets outside our solar system, known as exoplanets, to identify signatures of molecules in their atmospheres.

[Wednesday, February 21, 2007] HD 189733b is a type of planet known as a "hot Jupiter." It orbits very close to its star, completing one revolution every 2.2 days. Its mass and physical size are both slightly larger than Jupiter.

[Friday, February 23, 2007] While NASA and ESA focus on Mars rovers and future missions to search for life on the Red Planet, a determined core of scientists is lobbying for equal attention to a place they feel is just as likely to harbor life - Jupiter's icy moon Europa.

[Sunday, February 25, 2007] At 03:57 CET today, mission controllers at ESOC, ESA's Space Operations Centre in Germany, confirmed Rosetta's successful swingby of Mars, a key milestone in the 7.1-thousand-million km journey of this unique spacecraft to its target comet in 2014.

[Sunday, February 25, 2007] A skull and crossbones, a running person and radiating ionizing waves, joined other more common warning symbols today as part of a United Nations effort to reduce needless deaths and serious injuries from accidental exposure to large radioactive sources.

[Tuesday, February 27, 2007] This radar image, obtained by Cassini's radar instrument during a near-polar flyby on Feb. 22, 2007, shows a big island smack in the middle of one of the larger lakes imaged on Saturn's moon Titan.

[Wednesday, February 28, 2007] NASA-funded researchers are refining a tool that could not only check for the faintest traces of life's molecular building blocks on Mars, but could also determine whether they have been produced by anything alive.