Mars, Moon | featured news

A British astrobiology conference has revived a years-old debate over the best place to look for life elsewhere in the solar system: Mars, or the moons of Jupiter and Saturn? "For reasons I don't really understand, the wider solar system and the potential for life there has not been high priority," The Telegraph quoted Robert Pappalardo, a senior research scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, as saying on BBC Radio 4.

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....