Astronomy, Science | featured news

As big as a car and as well-equipped as a laboratory, NASA's newest Mars rover blows away its predecessors in size and skill. Nicknamed Curiosity and scheduled for launch on Saturday, the rover has a 7-foot arm tipped with a jackhammer and a laser to break through the Martian red rock. What really makes it stand out: It can analyze rocks and soil with unprecedented accuracy. "This is a Mars scientist's dream machine," said NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory's Ashwin Vasavada, the deputy project scientist. Once on the red planet, Curiosity will be on the lookout for organic, carbon-containing compounds. While the rover can't actually detect the presence of living organisms, scientists hope to learn from the $2.5 billion, nuclear-powered mission whether Mars has - or ever had - what it takes to nurture microbial life.

For explorers searching for life beyond Earth, the siren song of Europa, Jupiter’s icy moon, trills sweetly. “Europa has the best chance of having life there today,” said Britney Schmidt, who studies the moon at the University of Texas at Austin. Astrobiologists think so because NASA’s Galileo probe found strong evidence for a deep, briny ocean covering the entire moon deep under the icy surface.

Russian scientists were racing against the clock Wednesday to find a way to fire the engines of an unmanned probe destined to collect soil samples from a moon of Mars, after equipment failure shortly after launch left it stuck in Earth orbit....

The biggest asteroid to cruise by Earth in 35 years will make its closest approach Tuesday at 6:28 p.m. Scientists say there is no danger. The 1,200-foot-long charcoal-black space rock, called 2005 YU55, will come no closer than 200,000 miles, just inside the orbit of the moon. It is too faint to see with the naked eye, but backyard astronomers can spy the asteroid with six-inch or larger telescopes as the nearly spherical rock zooms across the constellations Aquila and Pegasus.

For the first time, astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope were able to directly observe the matter spiraling in to a black hole.

An asteroid bigger than an aircraft carrier will dart between the Earth and moon on Tuesday - the closest encounter by such a huge rock in 35 years.

Science editor Alan Boyle's Weblog: The end of a 520-day simulated space mission marks one more step in a succession of make-believe trips to Mars, leading up to the real thing.

European astronomers report galaxies likely merged and churned out metal-rich stars, early in the universe. From 12 billion light years distance, the gamma ray burst, GRB 090323, was spotted by NASA satellites and then Earthly telescopes in 2009 (one light year equals 5.9 trillion miles). The blast appears to have originated in one galaxy and pierced another nearby on its way o Earth, report European Southern Observatory astronomers.

Is China on course to surpass the United States as the world's space superpower and stake a claim on the moon in the next 15 years? Billionaire space executive Robert Bigelow is deeply worried about that scenario — and he says Americans need a "kick in the ass" to respond to the challenge.

New evidence supports the theory that comets delivered a significant portion of Earth' s oceans, which scientists believe formed about 8 million years after the planet itself.