January 2010 Top Stories
»» NASA's Kepler Space Telescope Discovers Five Exoplanets
[Monday, January 4, 2010] NASA's Kepler space telescope, designed to find Earth-size planets in the habitable zone of sun-like stars, has discovered its first five new exoplanets, or planets beyond our solar system.
»» Spectacular Mars images reveal evidence of ancient lakes
[Monday, January 4, 2010] Spectacular satellite images suggest that Mars was warm enough to sustain lakes three billion years ago.
»» Goddard scientist's breakthrough given ticket to Mars
[Tuesday, January 5, 2010] The quest to discover whether Mars ever hosted an environment friendly to microscopic forms of life has just gotten a shot in the arm.
»» Most Earthlike Exoplanet Started out as Gas Giant
[Wednesday, January 6, 2010] The most earthlike planet yet found around another star may be the rocky remains of a Saturn-sized gas giant, according to research presented today at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Washington.
»» Dust From Extrasolar Planet Collisions?
[Thursday, January 7, 2010] Using the Gemini South telescope in Chile, astronomers at UCLA have found dusty evidence for the formation of young, rocky planets around a star some 500 light-years distant.
»» How Earth Survived Birth
[Thursday, January 7, 2010] For the last 20 years, the best models of planet formation -- or how planets grow from dust in a gas disk -- have contradicted the very existence of Earth.
»» Groundbreaking study: New book details first university-sponsored expedition to Antarctica
[Saturday, January 9, 2010] It took Colin Bull 50 years before he published an account of his first Antarctic expedition, a groundbreaking study of the McMurdo Dry Valleys.
»» VLT Captures First Direct Spectrum of an Exoplanet
[Wednesday, January 13, 2010] By studying a triple planetary system that resembles a scaled-up version of our own Sun's family of planets, astronomers have been able to obtain the first direct spectrum.
»» Avatar: A Stunning New World That NASA Continues to Ignore
[Monday, January 18, 2010] James Cameron's "Avatar" has continued to break box office records, has won the Golden Globe Awards for "best picture" and "best director", and is now headed for the Oscars. So, how did NASA capitalize on this phenomenon? Answer: It didn't.
»» Land Ho! Huygens Plunged to Titan Surface 5 Years Ago
[Monday, January 18, 2010] The Huygens probe parachuted down to the surface of Saturn's haze-shrouded moon Titan exactly five years ago on Jan. 14, 2005, providing data that scientists on NASA's Cassini mission to Saturn are still building upon today.
»» Tooling up ExoMars
[Monday, January 18, 2010] ESA and NASA are inviting scientists from across the world to propose instruments for their joint Mars mission, the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter.
