Tag: Planets

Planet Nine From Outer Space

This is not some SciFi flick from Bela Ligosi(?) back in the 30’s (?)….instead this Saturday I want to write about a recent astronomical discovery…..

An enormous planet containing 10 times the mass of the Earth could explain the unusual orbit of a newly discovered asteroid. If found, the giant world would represent the first discovery of a planet in our solar system since Pluto in 1930, and before that Neptune in 1846. (Pluto was subsequently downgraded from planet to “dwarf planet” in 2006.)

The asteroid in question is called 2015 BP519. It was discovered three years ago at fifty-five times the Earth’s distance to the sun. Since that time, a group of astronomers led by Juliette Becker of the University of Michigan have been tracking it.

They now conclude the space rock is following a highly unusual orbit that is most easily explained if the gravity of a large – as yet unseen – planet has pulled it into place.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/across-the-universe/2018/may/23/planet-nine-from-outer-space-is-there-another-world-beyond-neptune

Anybody remember a dude named Sitchin?

Followers and readers of Zecharia Sitchin will know that the information about Nibiru comes from the Sumerians and the writing and artifacts they, and other ancient people, left behind. The core premise he has made in his writings is that there is a 10th Planet (again, including Pluto) in our solar system with an elliptical orbit of about 3600 of our years. People from Nibiru came to Earth and discovered the gold they needed to help repair their atmosphere and they began mining it. Much of the knowledge of these ancient people, which they knew because the Anunnaki (those who from heaven to Earth came) told them, has come true, including the color and size of Neptune and Uranus, and the very existence of the outer planets, long before our telescopes could find them. Scientists even suspect another large object in the Kuiper Belt, which might be Nibiru. So let’s assume that the other writings also have merit.

According to Zecharia Sitchin, and discussed at length in his book, The End of Days, Nibiru is not due to come near Earth for at least several hundred more years. Although it is possible that celestial events have impacted Nibiru’s orbit and shortened its annual cycle from 3600 years to something less, we don’t need to worry about its presence near Earth for some time.

……..(Oh Hell read for yourself)

http://www.sitchin.com/

More fodder for the “Ancient Alien” crowd?  I mean these guys see shit everywhere….this could make their case for them….at least for awhile.

But what you guys feel about this….if anything.

My day has begun and I will make the most of it……please you guys do the same.

Hiding In Plain Sight

Saturday and I am getting myself ready for some news from my doctor……

SO that lead me to think about some of theories of the destruction of the planet….if you are a fan of the Ancient Aliens theory (of which I am not) then you know all about the mysterious planet….Niburu or Planet X….

Many people think these “conspiracist” are out of their minds……….but some news that hit thw wires last week nay give their crazy theories new legs…..

Astronomically inclined conspiracy theorists have long been predicting the Earth’s demise in a collision with a rogue planet called “Niburu” or “Planet X” biding its time out of sight somewhere in the solar system, CNET reports. In fact, Niburu was “supposed” to crash into Earth just last month. And while death-by-planet remains unlikely, the existence of an undiscovered planet in our solar system is now almost a certainty, according to NASA. Planetary astrophysicist Konstantin Batygin and professor Mike Brown set out to disprove the existence of a hidden planet a few years ago and, ironically, ended up finding convincing evidence for the existence of what they call “Planet Nine.”

The main evidence for Planet Nine comes from its “gravitational footprint,” but it’s convincing enough that Batygin says the solar system makes a lot more sense with the hidden planet than without it, Space.com reports. Planet Nine is believed to be 10 times more massive than Earth and located about 20 times farther from the sun than Neptune. From its position in the far reaches of the solar system, it has tilted and reversed the orbits of objects in the Kuiper Belt, according to Batygin and Brown. It also may be the reason the orbits of the planets are slightly off from the sun’s equator. Finally, Planet Nine could be the “super Earth” frequently found orbiting other stars but “conspicuously absent” around ours. Oh, and NASA wants conspiracy theorists to know Planet Nine, if it exists, is staying far away from Earth.

There you are….your astronomical news…..whatcha think?

Here Comes The Neighborhood

My weekend is going good…I hope everyone here is also having a pleasant weekend…..hopefully all are relaxing and enjoying the day….

Before I jump into my post for today I would like to share a couple of bumper stickers I saw this week……

jesus-loves-you

This one is my fave…I live in the “Bible Belt” so I am always getting someone approaching me  with some “witness” or another….but this one I love ….

WHITE - 6.5 x 2.75" Jesus Is Coming And Boy Is He Pissed Vinyl Die Cut Decal bumper sticker, windows, cars, trucks, laptops, etc

Okay let’s jump into today’s post before I get sidetracked again…..

Today’s post is about Earth 2….not the Scifi show from 20 years ago but a real-life Earth 2….for years now scientist having been saying they have found earth-like planets in our universe…..but this time they are proclaiming  “we hit the jackpot”!

After scanning the vast reaches of the cosmos for Earth-like planets where life might exist, astronomers have found one right next door, the AP reports. A planet that is rocky like Earth and only slightly bigger has been discovered orbiting Proxima Centauri, the nearest star to our solar system, scientists reported Wednesday. It is probably in the not-too-hot, not-too-cold Goldilocks Zone where liquid water—a key to life—is possible, if the planet has an atmosphere. And it is a mere 4.22 light-years from Earth, or nearly 25 trillion miles. It is easily the closest potentially habitable planet ever detected outside our solar system—and one that could be reachable by tiny, unmanned space probes before the end of the century, in time for some people alive today to witness it.

The international team of astronomers that announced the discovery did not actually see the planet but deduced its existence indirectly, by using telescopes to spot and precisely calculate the gravitational pull on the star by a possible orbiting body—a tried-and-true method of planet-hunting. “We hit the jackpot here,” said Guillem Anglada-Escude, an astrophysicist at the Queen Mary University of London and lead author of a study on the discovery in the journal Nature. He said the planet is “more or less what we have on Earth.” They’re calling it Proxima b, and while it could be like Earth in the important features, it would probably still look very alien. It is 4.6 million miles from its red dwarf star, or just one-twentieth of the distance between Earth and the sun, creating an incredible orange sky with no blue, so it looks like a perpetual sunset. And if that’s not different enough, the planet circles its star so quickly that its year is about 11 days. Click for more on the planet, which doesn’t rotate.

Enjoy the rest of your day…..I shall be back tomorrow….not a threat but rather a promise…..

Peace out, my friends!

 

Civilization Is Where You Find It

This will be my only post today as my weekend begins and I am feeling my oats….wink wink.  My granddaughter will be by today for a rematch in Dominoes……I am teaching her backgammon….she will be good at it as soon as she gets all the stuff down……I am also tutoring her in history……especially the early years of civilization….she is an excellent student….very inquisitive.

The garden is doing good….tomatoes are starting to come in almost daily…..the peaches and pears are maturing and the grapes are graping….pain has made the last week a bitch….but I take my pain out on those people that try to anger me with BS instead of facts…..made the best pork roast ever!  It was a honey mustard crusted roast…..absolutely yummy.

Enough with the niceties….move on and get it out of the way…..

I admit that I also have guilty pleasures when it comes to TV….some watch the mind numbing reality crap others want something else….me?  My guilty pleasure is a bowl of popcorn and the History Channel’s “Ancient Aliens”……in case you have not seen this piece of work…..for 5 or 6 season there has been some dudue with wild hair giving his theories that all antiquity is thanx to ETs visits in our past….the pyramids, Mayas, Stonehenge……well you get the idea.  These visitors came to the Fertile crescent to mine gold and started civilization…..no this is not some tongue in cheek thing these people believe that….gold….in Iraq……and it gets stranger like the dinos were killed to make room for their experiment (humans)……the Black Death was an alien situation….on and on……

But first….a little music interlude……

I bring this up because I read something that will give them ammo for at least 2 more seasons……

The odds of us being the first technological civilization the universe has ever seen are similar to those of Elvis and the Loch Ness monster sharing a Powerball jackpot, according to a new study. In a paper published in Astrobiology, researchers updated the famous 1961 Drake equation on the probability of alien civilizations to include what we know now about the prevalence of possibly habitable planets, and concluded that there have almost certainly been billions of other civilizations. Lead researcher Adam Frank, a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Rochester, says that even if civilization arose on just one in a trillion planets, which he calls a very pessimistic estimate, there would have been more than 10 billion civilizations since the universe began, reports LiveScience.

Frank, who estimates the odds of us being the first technological civilization to arise are in the neighborhood of one in 10 billion trillion, calls his calculations the “archaeological form” of the Drake equation, since billions of other intelligent species have presumably become extinct over the universe’s 13 billion-year history, Discovery reports. With only our 10,000-year history to go on, how long alien civilizations last is one of the big remaining unknowns, he says—and we should “begin exploring the problem using simulations to get a sense of what leads to long-lived civilizations and what doesn’t.”

If you want a good chuckle then I suggest you watch this program and see how they want to re-write our history……as a history geek I love to watch and point out the crap from the facts……

Please start your weekend on a happy note and enjoy your time off…….

“Live long and prosper” civilization….remember…”life here began out there”  Immortal words of Battlestar Galactica

Is It Out There?

My final day of smiles and granddaughter giving me crap about my ignorance of ‘puters…..12 years old and I use her for tech support…..

A few years ago the astronomical world made a decision that Pluto was not a planet….and the world went batcrap crazy…..everyone was concerned that Pluto had lost it’s standing as planet 9 in our solar system……

Then a NASA probe beamed back photos of the planet and a new interest was found……these were amazing photos….check them out……

Source: New Horizons | NASA

Now we have more news from Pluto……it seems there is another really large planet in our solar system……

Pluto is gonna be PO’d. While the dwarf planet tries to fight its way back into the good graces of Those Who Deem What Counts as a Planet, another icy orb even further out may snatch that designation first. Astronomers at the California Institute of Technology say a giant celestial body “lurking at the end of our solar system,” as the Washington Post puts it, may actually be a planet, and they’re even already calling it “Planet Nine.” In their research published in the Astronomical Journal, the sky-watching scientists—one of whom is known as the “Pluto killer” for his role in getting Pluto demoted—think their find is five to 10 times as massive as Earth, and per the AP, almost as big as Neptune and orbiting billions of miles past that planet’s orbit. Michael “Pluto Killer” Brown and Konstantin Batygin haven’t seen the supposed planet directly, but say they can infer the “massive perturber” exists by how the orbits of smaller bodies nearby are affected by its gravitational pull, the Post notes.

What’s interesting is that Brown and Batygin originally set out to disprove the existence of Planet Nine. “We thought their idea was crazy,” Brown says of the scientists who originally floated the idea of a large, hidden planet. But as they did their own research, they soon came to their own conclusion in what Brown calls a “jaw-dropping moment” that Planet Nine could be the real deal. Now they’re simply hoping more astronomers join in to actually try to spot the alleged planet—and they’re not concerned it will face Pluto’s fate. “That’s not even a question—it’s definitely a planet,” Brown says. Not everyone’s convinced. “I have seen many, many such claims in my career,” a planetary scientist at Colorado’s Southwest Research Institute tells Nature. “And all of them have been wrong.” (The Washington Post caught up with Brown for a Q&A on the latest Pluto-killing endeavor.)

Let me see….we have the Hubble and others that can reach out and study planets 100s of light years away…..and yet they missed a really large planet that is in our solar system…..how is that?

Anyway….more info that is trying to crap on this “discovery”……

Source: Is there really a mysterious new planet out there? NASA is still skeptical. – Vox

Well guys…what do you think about this news?

 

Maybe There Is Something To All The Ancient Alien BS

It is a Saturday and I will be spending my time doing whatever the Hell I feel like….it is cool and it is a down day….cannot get any better than that, right?

If you have been unfortunate enough to watch some of the Ancient Alien stuff on the History Channel then you will know what I am talking about…..if not….the big premise is that in the early days of history ancient aliens came to Sumer (Iraq) to mine gold for their world was in a dangerous short supply……the problem with that is there is NO gold in Iraq…..South Africa would have been a better choice….but maybe their navigation ‘puter was on the blink.

Any way there seems that astronomers have found something unusual in a far away galaxy……

Something very weird has been spotted in space, and a quote from an astronomer at Penn State gets to the heart of why it’s so intriguing: “Aliens should always be the very last hypothesis you consider, but this looked like something you would expect an alien civilization to build,” Jason Wright tells the Atlantic. The “this” he’s referring to involves an unusual star in the Northern Hemisphere’s sky named KIC 8462852, one that the Kepler telescope first began looking at in 2009. Based on the weird light pattern it’s emitting, the star appears to have a “big mess of matter” around it, writes Ross Anderson. The problem is that, based on the star’s age and other factors, scientists can’t explain why that “mess of matter” is there. In a new paper, they float a number of scientific explanations—”occultation by circumstellar dust clumps,” for instance, or comets—but none mesh well with current scientific understanding. “We’d never seen anything like this star,” says lead author Tabetha Boyajian of Yale. “We thought it might be bad data or movement on the spacecraft, but everything checked out.”

Enter Penn State’s Wright, who floats a doozy of a less scientific theory: The light pattern could be explained by some kind of massive structures built by aliens. No, Wright “isn’t some wild-eyed crackpot,” writes Phil Plait at Slate, and, in fact, Wright tells Plait the idea should be approached “skeptically.” (Plait agrees, calling it, “um, unlikely.”) Indeed, it “may sound like science fiction,” notes a post at Discovery, “but our galaxy has existed for over 13 billion years, (and) it’s not such a stretch of the imagination to think that an alien civilization may be out there and evolved to the point where they can build megastructures around stars.” Wright is working on a proposal with SETI to investigate further by pointing a radio telescope at the star. The idea is to “listen in for a sort of buzz that indicates not alien radio signals, but a sort of hum of alien technology,” explains Popular Mechanics. Who knows, it adds, this could be the “smoking gun that we’re not alone.

Just a little something to get you to think……

Enjoy your weekend….I know I shall.

Water! The Biggest Story Of The Week

I will join the parade and post on NASA’s big story…..WATER has been found on Mars…..but as important as that was….it is NOT the big story!

Bear with me for a few moments.

NASA made its much-hyped big announcement today, and what it comes down to is that scientists have found the strongest evidence yet that there’s liquid water on the Red Planet, the Washington Post reports. Last April, using data from the Curiosity rover, researchers noted that perchlorates were present on the planet. Those are a type of salt, and they could make the boiling point of water on Mars—which is extremely low thanks to low pressure on the planet—much higher, which would mean that liquid water containing perchlorates could form during certain parts of the year. It’s been theorized that such water could be responsible for forming the geographic features known as recurring slope lineae (RSL) that have often been seen on Mars. Researchers have been looking at RSL features and found lots of perchlorates that appear to have been getting hydrated.

“We’re going to places where we thought we were seeing the presence of water and finding chemical evidence of perchlorates,” says the lead researcher. And one of the April researchers, who wasn’t involved in this latest study, tells the Post, “[The] flow of liquid salty water is no longer just a possibility; it does actually occur. The results [show] that liquid does indeed flow on Mars today.” But more research is necessary to actually confirm liquid water exists on the planet; the lead researcher says he hopes a rover can someday look closely at the RSL features. If liquid water does exist on Mars, it’s good news for astronauts who might one day travel there. “If we ever go there, we could probably utilize this. We wouldn’t have to bring tons of water,” says the lead researcher. “This stuff seems like science fiction, but in 100 years or so it could be fact.” It could also “boost the notion of life on Mars,” the AP notes.

The water story is a big deal….but SORRY….it is not the big story!

Rush Limbaugh is the bigger story……..

Strong evidence of water on Mars is either an amazing discovery or a leftist plot, depending on whether you’re talking to NASA scientists or Rush Limbaugh. On his radio show yesterday, the latter said that while he’s a “big time” science guy, he’s not buying the latest announcement because “NASA has been corrupted by the current regime” and he believes the discovery “is somehow going to find its way into a technique to advance the leftist agenda,” Politico reports.

Limbaugh said that since NASA has been “making up” temperature data for years, “lying and making up false charts and so forth,” he suspects it’s making up the Mars news as well, probably for “something to do with global warming.” “Maybe there was once an advanced civilization. If they say they found flowing water, next they’re going to find a graveyard,” he said, per Media Matters.

That my friends is the big story!

You have got to love the lack of a mental process from people like Rush……let’s not leave out the people that listen to him for news…..

When mental midgets attack!

Even More Space Stuff

As always I am looking to the stars for answers….(how’s that for philosophical?)……..and while reading stuff I came across two more articles about space stuff…..

Before I start…….Mars has moons with names…..Jupiter has moons with names…..Saturn the same……then why is the Earth’s moon named…..MOON?

First there is Mars….always a source of great speculation and wonder…….and in the last decade information about the planet is coming at an alarming pace…….

Imagine all the water in the Arctic Ocean. Now, imagine all that and more on Mars. If you visited the Red Planet roughly 4.3 billion years ago, that’s what you likely would have found, say NASA scientists. Their new study arrived at that “solid estimate … by determining how much water was lost to space,” says lead author Geronimo Villanueva. The Guardian reports the scientists used three powerful infrared telescopes to analyze two forms of water in Mars’ atmosphere: H2O and HDO, in which deuterium (aka “heavy” hydrogen) has taken the place of one hydrogen atom. As National Geographic explains, Mars’ gravity is weaker than our own; that allowed hydrogen to escape from the atmosphere and into space over time, boosting the amount of deuterium in its water. Scientists compared the ratio of HDO to H2O in Martian water today with that in water from a 4.5 billion-year-old Mars meteorite to arrive at their conclusions, a press release states.

They ultimately calculated that Mars was once home to 20 million cubic kilometers of ocean. It could have covered every inch of the planet in water 450 feet deep, but the scientists think a different scenario is more likely: that the ocean covered roughly a fifth of the planet, was located in the northern hemisphere, and was as much as a mile deep. While National Geographic observes the findings back up “reams of earlier evidence that water once existed on the surface” of Mars, another study author points out the assessment of the degree of water lost indicates something new. “The planet was very likely wet for a longer period of time than was previously thought, suggesting it might have been habitable for longer,” a scientist says. (Mysterious plumes on Mars are stumping scientists.)

Speaking of water in space….the common belief is that before we can find life we need to locate water…….but is there a chance there is water in our system?

Thanks to the Cassini spacecraft, we already knew that one of Saturn’s moons has a big ocean. Now things have gotten more interesting on Enceladus. It turns out that the ocean is not only warm, it seems to have the same kind of hydrothermal activity going on as oceans on Earth, reports NASA. Bottom line: “This may be the place to go look for life in the outer solar system,” says a Cornell scientist not involved with the new study in Nature. That would be microbial life, under conditions similar to those in a network of hot springs under the Atlantic Ocean known as the “Lost City,” reports AP. Some scientists think that ancient hydrothermal field yielded the first life on our planet.

Some extra-terrestrial sleuthing resulted in the Enceladus discovery: Knowing that a geyser shooting up from the moon’s south pole sends up dust particles that settle on Saturn’s outer ring, researchers analyzed the outer ring. They discovered that the dust particles were mostly silica, explains Popular Mechanics, and the makeup of that silica yielded details about the ocean in which they were formed. “We think that the temperature at least in some part of the ocean must be higher than 190 degrees Fahrenheit,” team member Sean Hsu tells NPR. “If you could swim a little bit further from the really hot part then it could be comfy.” The only way to “nail the habitability question” is to send up a new spacecraft to Enceladus with more modern instruments, says the Cornell researcher. He’s already working on the proposal. (Read about how Pluto might rejoin the planet club.)

And the discoveries just keep coming and coming….eventually we should have first hand knowledge…….those days are closer than we imagine…..I do believe.

News From The “Final Frontier”

Sunday and the latest spacey stuff news……I always enjoy reading the new stuff about space……and it seems to be a continuing saga…..

For instance…….

Saturn’s moon Titan, which happens to be larger than the planet Mercury, is cold. Very cold. As in -290 degrees Fahrenheit is not out of the ordinary. These super low temps, combined with an atmosphere roughly 1.5 times as dense as Earth’s, have resulted in a few extraordinary bodies of liquid methane and ethane, reports Extreme Tech, and scientists are anxious to explore their depths. (In fact, Titan is the only body aside from Earth to boast liquid lakes on its surface.) So NASA is working up a (very early) model of a submarine drone that could do just that—one that CNET reports will likely be nuclear-powered, weigh a ton, and come equipped with a seafloor camera, sampling system, and other fancy futuristic robotic accoutrements.

But don’t get too excited just yet. First, this is a fully automated mission: “Even if it were possible for humans to go swimming in Titan’s seas,” notes CNET, it “would be something like swimming in a freezing ocean of liquefied natural gas.” Hence, NASA‘s goal of sending the “highly capable science craft” to Titan’s largest sea, Kraken Mare, around the year 2040, in what it calls “an unprecedented planetary exploration mission.” Many details remain to be sorted out, including how to get the craft to Titan (Boeing’s X-37 is a possibility), how to land it (parachute drop), and while there, how to communicate with Earthlings (planar phased-array antenna). (Something else on Titan has been stumping NASA.)

There is always something new about Mars…….

Amateur astronomers have made an unexpected discovery: massive plumes spouting up at least 125 miles from the surface of Mars. Two plumes, up to 620 miles wide, were spotted over the Terra Cimmeria area in the red planet’s Southern Hemisphere by at least 18 people over two 10-day periods in March and April 2012, Discovery News reports. A witness tells the BBC one plume looked like a “projection sticking out of the side of the planet.” They appeared to form during cold mornings and changed “from double blob protrusions to pillars or finger-plume-like morphologies,” according to a study in Nature. As to what’s causing them, “Frankly, I’m puzzled,” says a lead scientist. Clouds made of carbon dioxide and ice crystals have been spotted by the Hubble Space Telescope in the past, but they only reached 62 miles from the planet’s surface, CBS News reports. Clouds of dust reached just 37 miles high.

Scientists have two theories, but “both explanations defy our current understanding of Mars’ upper atmosphere,” they say. The plumes could be caused by “a reflective cloud of water-ice, carbon dioxide-ice, or dust particles,” the study author explains, but clouds shouldn’t be able to form at such altitudes where the atmosphere is so thin. Others note the plumes may be bright auroras “1,000 times stronger than the strongest aurora” on Earth, but that, too, is “highly unrealistic.” Whatever the cause, “this type of feature must be very rare, to have been observed only once out of all of the time that telescopic observers and spacecraft have been observing Mars,” a scientist says. NASA’s MAVEN spacecraft, now in Mars’ orbit, may be able to shed light on the mystery, researchers say.

Then there is the manned mission to Mars…..unfortunately it will most likely be a one way trip……who the Hell would choose to die on Mars?  Right?

From 202,586 to about 1,000 and now winnowed down to 100. That’s how many finalists are left competing for a one-way ticket to Mars in the highly publicized Mars One project. The finalists will now compete for one of 24 crew member spots, with the goal of sending those 24 to Mars to set up a settlement by as early as 2024, NBC News reports; the Dutch nonprofit hopes to make the competition into a reality-TV show. Fifty men and 50 women (hopefuls can check names on the finalists’ list here) have been selected after undergoing personal online interviews with Norbert Kraft, the project’s chief medical officer.

The remaining competitors will next be placed onto teams to see how well they handle group situations. “Being one of the best individual candidates does not automatically make you the greatest team player,” Kraft says, per a Mars One news release. Meanwhile, Mars One CEO Bas Lansdorp applauds the elite new group, saying, “The large cut in candidates is an important step towards finding out who has the right stuff to go to Mars.” But is the mission even really going to happen? As NBC notes, a 2014 MIT press release called some of the logistics “overly optimistic.”

There you have it…news from the edge of the cosmos……

Now go and enjoy thew rest of your weekend!

Space: The Final Frontier

Thank you…it is the weekend and I can step away from the Trolls and the mental midgets and five my readers something a little different……Space Stuff!

My granddaughter’s name got put on the Orien Mission and sent into space…… I gave it to her because she is such a space geek…..she was speechless…..made my day because she is NEVER speechless.

Anyway on to the space stuff….

Since our Rovers on Mars have started working them have sent back volumes of info……and the trend continues…..

(Newser) – There’s still no proof there was ever life on Mars, but evidence is starting to pile up that conditions were once ripe for life to begin, NASA scientists say. The Curiosity rover’s exploration of the Gale Crater has found signs that liquid water flowed on the planet’s surface for tens of millions of years, CNET reports, giving life (of the microbial kind at least) much longer to get going than researchers had previously believed. The rover had already determined that the planet once had the right chemical ingredients for life, reports the Guardian, and sediment deposits have now revealed that lakes and rivers were once common on its surface, with large amounts of water remaining underground even after those dried up.

Curiosity team members say the new findings suggest that early Mars was much like early Earth. “What I get excited about is imagining a Mars 3.5 to 4 billion years ago, a planet with a thick atmosphere, maybe a blue sky with puffy clouds and mountains and lakes and rivers,” John M. Grunsfeld, a NASA science administrator, tells the New York Times. Grunsfeld, who’s also a former astronaut, says the Curiosity mission has given vital clues to how and where to search for evidence of Martian life. “We don’t know if life ever started on Mars, but if it did, we now have a better chance of discovering it,” he says.

On another note…….we launched a probe known as New Horizon……it was sent to explore deep space as it nears Pluto the device has awakened to continue its mission……

Newser) – New Horizons just got what’s probably the earliest wakeup call ever. Even though it’s not supposed to fly by Pluto—the destination of its nine-year, 3-billion-mile journey—until July, the NASA craft roused itself from its “hibernation” slumber and is fully awake for the last leg of its mission, Space.com reports. Russell Watson’s “Where My Heart Will Take Me” blasted NH out of its somnambulant state with a personal message from Watson himself before crooning the appropriate lyrics, “It’s been a long road/Getting from there to here.” About 20 scientists waiting back home in Maryland at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory got the confirmation signals on Saturday evening that New Horizons was up and at ’em, just over 162 million miles from Pluto.

The piano-sized craft, which was launched in 2006, had been “asleep” since August to conserve energy and reduce wear and tear on its systems. It’s been asleep before (18 other times, to be exact) during its long trip, but this was the last sleep before it makes it to the Kuiper Belt, the icy “disc-shaped region” that harbors Pluto and other dwarf worlds, NASA notes. “This is the place that this spacecraft was built to operate, and these are the operations that this team has waited a decade to actually go and execute,” New Horizons’ principle investigator says. “So it’s game time.” (New Horizons got some great pics of Jupiter during its flyby nearly eight years ago.)

We keep piling up data and eventually we will go to space and the future will arrive.