European astronomers have found a trio of "super-Earths" closely circling a star that astronomers once figured had nothing orbiting it.
The discovery demonstrates that planets keep popping up in unexpected places around the universe. The announcement is the first time three planets close to Earth's size were found orbiting a single star, said Swiss astronomer Didier Queloz.
The Phoenix lander has uncovered a patch of what may be ice on the border of a polygon-shaped section of soil in Mars's northern plains.
The lander's robotic arm uncovered the white substance after further excavating sites called Dodo and Baby Bear to create one large trench. The patch sits at the edge of a polygon, a geological formation created by the seasonal expansion and shrinkage of ice in the Martian soil.
Some fundamental building blocks of our genetic code might have come from outer space, according to a controversial new meteorite study.
The study suggests that some organic compounds associated with genetic material might have formed in a meteorite called Murchison before it landed in Australia in 1969. The chemicals are two kinds of nucleobases, ring-like carbon molecules that are essential for the creation of nucleic acids like DNA and RNA.
Space shuttle Discovery pulled away from the international space station on Wednesday and began its journey home, ending a nine-day visit highlighted by the installation of a new Japanese lab.
The shuttle and its crew of seven, including a Japanese astronaut, are due back on Earth on Saturday.
"We wish them the best with their expedition and we hope we left them a better, more capable space station than when we arrived. Sayonara," shuttle commander Mark Kelly told the space station crew before leaving.
A team of astronauts working inside and out anchored a giant billion-dollar Japanese lab to the international space station Tuesday, making it the biggest room there.
The long-awaited moment of contact came as two of the crew were winding up a spacewalk.
Spacewalkers Michael Fossum and Ronald Garan Jr. took care of all the preliminaries, removing covers and disconnecting cables on the bus-size lab, named Kibo, Japanese for hope. They left it to their colleagues inside to do the heavy lifting, by way of the space station's robot arm.
If Dr. Robert Zubrin could take a trip to Mars, he would be sure to pack a bread maker in his suitcase. Not just because bread is a pretty reliable expeditionary food, but because the act of cooking, according to Zubrin, seems to help people get along with each other, especially when they are in slightly dire, less than luxurious and more than stressful circumstances.
Using NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, scientists have found a bizarre ring of material around the magnetic remains of a star that blasted to smithereens, NASA reported Wednesday.
The stellar corpse, called SGR 1900+14, belongs to a class of objects known as magnetars. These are the cores of massive stars that blew up in supernova explosions, but unlike other dead stars, they slowly pulsate with X-rays and have tremendously strong magnetic fields.
Dutch scientists claim they have completed the first sequencing of an individual woman's DNA.
The researchers at Leiden University Medical Center reported the sequencing of the entire genome of one of their female researchers, clinical geneticist Marjolein Kriek.
"If anyone could properly consider the ramifications of knowing his or her sequence, it is a clinical geneticist,” Professor Gert-Jan B. van Ommen, leader of the research team and director of the Center for Medical Systems Biology, said in a news release issued Monday.
NASA couldn't send commands to the Phoenix Mars lander for most of Tuesday because of a radio glitch, delaying a second day of activities, officials said.
The minor problem was fixed later in the day and the Mars Reconnaissance orbiter resumed relaying the lander's images of the Martian landscape back to Earth, said NASA officials.
Phoenix, the latest spacecraft on Mars, communicates with scientists through two NASA orbiters circling the planet.
The first-ever landing of a probe near Mars' north pole happened smoothly on Sunday, NASA confirmed. The Mars Phoenix Lander, completing a 296-day, 422 million-mile journey, closed in on the Red Planet with a 50-50 chance of a successful touchdown on its arctic plains, NASA officials said.
The landing -- dubbed the "seven minutes of terror" -- was a nerve-wracking experience for mission managers, who have witnessed the failure of similar missions.
