[Wednesday, July 2, 2008] ESA and the Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales (CNES) will be co-hosting, in cooperation with NASA and the International Mars Exploration Working Group (IMEWG), an International Conference on 9 and 10 July 2008.

[Wednesday, July 2, 2008] Was the course of life on the planet altered 12,900 years ago by a giant comet exploding over Canada? New evidence found by UC Assistant Professor of Anthropology Ken Tankersley and colleagues suggests the answer is affirmative.

[Wednesday, July 2, 2008] "Tuesday AM dive. Deepworkers: Darlene Lim, Mike Gephardt. CapCom: Bernard South, south basin the 15m and 30m contours."

[Thursday, July 3, 2008] Arthur C. Clarke is best remembered for the saga 2001: A Space Odyssey, published 40 years ago. The driving force behind that novel and the screenplay was Stanley Kubrick, who had developed a fascination for extraterrestrial intelligence.

[Friday, July 4, 2008] University of Florida geologists say they have found strong evidence that a half-dozen major basins in India were formed a billion or more years ago, making them at least 500 million years older than commonly thought.

[Friday, July 4, 2008] The next soil sample delivered to NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander"s Thermal and Evolved-Gas Analyzer (TEGA) will be ice-rich.

[Tuesday, July 8, 2008] The June 26 issue of Nature features a report on the results of underwater research conducted with a pair of NASA Astrobiology-sponsored robotic explorers.

[Wednesday, July 9, 2008] Phoenix Mars Lander used its robotic arm to deliver a second sample of soil for analysis by the spacecraft's wet chemistry laboratory, data received from Phoenix on Sunday night confirmed.

[Thursday, July 10, 2008] In search of low-mass planetary companions we monitored Proxima Centauri as part of our M dwarf program. In the absence of a significant detection, we use these data to demonstrate the general capability of the RV method in finding terrestrial planets.

[Thursday, July 10, 2008] Signs of life on Mars may be hiding under its rocks, or perhaps hiding inside those rocks. A new study offers a simplified technique for detecting biological and pre-biotic molecules that become trapped inside minerals.

[Thursday, July 10, 2008] NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander's science and engineering teams are testing methods to get an icy sample into the Robotic Arm scoop for delivery to the Thermal and Evolved Gas Analyzer, or TEGA.

[Thursday, July 10, 2008] A detailed survey of stars in the Orion Nebula has found that fewer than 10 percent have enough surrounding dust to make Jupiter-sized planets, according to a report by astronomers.

[Tuesday, July 15, 2008] The oldest rocks so far identified on Earth are one-half billion years younger than the planet itself, so geologists have relied on certain crystals as micro-messengers from ancient times.

[Wednesday, July 16, 2008] Mars once hosted vast lakes, flowing rivers and a variety of other wet environments that had the potential to support life, according to two new studies based on data from the CRISM and other instruments on board NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).

[Wednesday, July 16, 2008] A powered rasp on the back of the robotic arm scoop of NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander is being tested for the first time on Mars in gathering sample shavings of ice.

[Wednesday, July 16, 2008] A powered rasp on the back of the robotic arm scoop of NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander successfully drilled into cement-hard frozen soil and loosened material that was collected in the lander's scoop.

[Wednesday, July 16, 2008] The Tunguska catastrophe in 1908 evidently led to high levels of acid rain. This is the conclusion reached by Russian, Italian and German researchers based on the results of analyses of peat profiles taken from the disaster region.

[Thursday, July 17, 2008] I recently learned that NASA has made some limited use of human cadavers in testing during the development of the Orion spacecraft. As you will see, there is a practical reason for using this approach.

[Thursday, July 17, 2008] NASA's Deep Impact spacecraft has created a video of the moon transiting (passing in front of) Earth as seen from the spacecraft's point of view 31 million miles away. Scientists are using the video to develop techniques to study alien worlds.

[Monday, July 21, 2008] To coordinate with observations made by an orbiter flying repeatedly overhead, NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander is working a schedule Monday that includes staying awake all night for the first time.

[Tuesday, July 22, 2008] The Pinwheel galaxy is gussied up in infrared light in a new picture from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope.

[Tuesday, July 22, 2008] Tiny microbes beneath the sea floor, distinct from life on the Earth's surface, may account for one-tenth of the Earth's living biomass, but many of these minute creatures are living on a geologic timescale.

[Wednesday, July 23, 2008] The first robotic mission to return samples to Earth from Mars took a further step toward realisation with the recent publication of a mission design report by the iMARS Working Group.

[Wednesday, July 23, 2008] The latest activities of NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander have moved the mission closer to analyzing a sample of material, possibly icy soil, from a hard layer at the bottom of a shallow trench beside the lander.

[Wednesday, July 23, 2008] Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison hosted NASA Administrator Michael Griffin and Secretary of Agriculture Edward T. Schafer during the signing of a MOU to enable the USDA ARS to conduct plant related research on the International Space Station.

[Thursday, July 24, 2008] A team of European scientists working with COROT have discovered an exoplanet orbiting a star slightly more massive than the Sun.

[Sunday, July 27, 2008] NASA's Phoenix Mars Landers robotic arm collected a more than adequate amount of icy soil for baking in one of the landers ovens but will need to adjust how it delivers samples.

[Sunday, July 27, 2008] NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander's robotic arm will use a revised collection-and-delivery sequence overnight Sunday with the goal of depositing an icy soil sample in the lander's ove

[Monday, July 28, 2008] Scientists and engineers on NASA's Phoenix Mars Mission spent the weekend examining how the icy soil on Mars interacts with the scoop on the lander's robotic arm, while trying different techniques to deliver a sample to one of the instruments.

[Tuesday, July 29, 2008] Well inside the Arctic Circle, scientists have found black smoker vents farther north than anyone has ever seen before. The cluster of five vents - one towering nearly four stories in height - are venting water as hot as 570 F.

[Wednesday, July 30, 2008] Using an instrument on NASA's Cassini orbiter, scientists have discovered that a lake-like feature in the south polar region of Saturn's moon, Titan, is truly wet. The lake is about 235 kilometers, or 150 miles, long.