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A UCL-led study has found that probes designed to find life on Mars do not drill deep enough to find the living cells that scientists believe may exist well below the surface.

Although current drills may find essential tell-tale signs that life once existed on Mars, cellular life could not survive the radiation levels for long enough any closer to the surface of Mars than a few metres deep ¬– beyond the reach of even state-of-the-art drills.

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Two years ago, planetary scientists across the world watched as Europe and the US did something amazing. The Huygens descent module drifted down through the hazy atmosphere of Saturn's moon Titan, beaming its data back to Earth via the Cassini mothership. Today, Huygens's data are still continuing to surprise researchers.

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At the surface of Titan, Huygens measured the temperature to be 94 ºK (-179 ºC) with a humidity of 45 percent.

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A giant cloud half the size of the United States has been imaged on Saturn’s moon Titan by the Cassini spacecraft. The cloud may be responsible for the material that fills the lakes discovered last year by Cassini's radar instrument.

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The universe contains one and a half times more calcium than previously assumed. This conclusion was drawn by astronomers of the SRON Netherlands Institute for Space Research, after observations with ESA's XMM-Newton X-ray observatory.

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NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has captured for the first time enough light from planets outside our solar system, known as exoplanets, to identify molecules in their atmospheres. The landmark achievement is a significant step toward being able to detect possible life on rocky exoplanets and comes years before astronomers had anticipated.

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On February 28, 2007, NASA's New Horizons spacecraft made its closest approach to Jupiter on its ultimate journey to Pluto. This flyby gave scientists a unique opportunity to study Jupiter using the package of instruments available on New Horizons, while coordinating observations from both space- and ground-based telescopes including NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory.

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For the very first time, astronomers have witnessed the speeding up of an asteroid's rotation, and have shown that it is due to a theoretical effect predicted but never seen before. The international team of scientists used an armada of telescopes to discover that the asteroid's rotation period currently decreases by 1 millisecond every year, as a consequence of the heating of the asteroid's surface by the Sun. Eventually it may spin faster than any known asteroid in the solar system and even break apart.

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Instruments on NASA's Cassini spacecraft have found evidence for seas, likely filled with liquid methane or ethane, in the high northern latitudes of Saturn's moon Titan. One such feature is larger than any of the Great Lakes of North America and is about the same size as several seas on Earth.

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For the first time ever, NASA researchers have successfully demonstrated in the laboratory that a space telescope rigged with special masks and mirrors could snap a photo of an Earth-like planet orbiting a nearby star.

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The Dawn spacecraft arrived at Astrotech Space Operations in Titusville, Fla., at 9 a.m. EDT today. Dawn, NASA's mission into the heart of the asteroid belt, is at the facility for final processing and launch operations. Dawn's launch period opens June 30.

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One year has passed since 11 April 2006, when Venus Express, Europe’s first mission to Venus and the only spacecraft now in orbit around the planet, reached its destination. Since then, this advanced probe, born to explore one of the most mysterious planetary bodies in the Solar System, has been revealing planetary details never caught before.

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After studying Mars four times as long as originally planned, NASA's Mars Global Surveyor orbiter appears to have succumbed to battery failure caused by a complex sequence of events involving the onboard computer memory and ground commands.

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SPIRIT UPDATE: Spirit Continues Studies En Route to 'Home Plate' - sol 1159-1163, April 13, 2007:

Spirit is healthy and has completed a campaign of scientific studies of a rock outcrop known as "Elizabeth Mahon," on the edge of "Home Plate." Spirit is now en route to another outcrop nicknamed "Madeline English." The route involves driving backward, turning around, backing up, parking in parallel between two sizable rocks flanking the target, pivoting clockwise on the stuck right front wheel, and finally "crabbing" forward to the target. Spirit performs crabbing by steering the two rear wheels toward the stuck right front wheel, thus opposing resistance from the right front wheel and keeping yawing (swinging from side to side) to a minimum.

Spirit executed the "parallel parking" portion of the trip on the rover's 1,162nd Martian day, or sol, of exploration (April 10, 2007). The final "crab" portion was planned for sol 1164 (April 12, 2007). After the investigation of Madeline English, plans called for the rover to head north to one of several possible "on-ramps" for driving onto Home Plate.

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OPPORTUNITY UPDATE: Characterizing Wind Streaks - sol 1131-1138, April 10, 2007:

Opportunity is healthy and is attempting to characterize the dark wind streak material which emanates from Victoria Crater as seen from orbital images.

On Sol 1132 the team planned a four-hour alpha particle X-ray spectrometer integration to measure atmospheric Argon. The purpose of this measurement is to determine the atmospheric mixing processes and track their changes with time.

Sol 1137 included a test of a fix for a steering bias bug in the mobility flight software. This is the fix for the problem the team saw on sol 1114, when the software selected an arc that was 13 degrees off course from the goal.

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Astronomers have discovered the most Earth-like planet outside our Solar System to date, an exoplanet with a radius only 50% larger than the Earth and capable of having liquid water. Using the ESO 3.6-m telescope, a team of Swiss, French and Portuguese scientists discovered a super-Earth about 5 times the mass of the Earth that orbits a red dwarf, [...]

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Did you read Steve Squyers book

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But at that distance from its star, what if it's tidally locked (permanent day on one side, permanent night on the other)?

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Researchers working with high-precision planetary radars, including the Goldstone Solar System Radar of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., have discovered strong evidence that the planet Mercury has a molten core. The finding explains a more than three-decade old planetary mystery that began with the flight of JPL's Mariner 10 spacecraft. [...]

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Astronomers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory have recently concluded that the upcoming planet-finding mission, SIM PlanetQuest, would be able to detect an Earth-like planet around the star 40 Eridani, a planet familiar to "Star Trek" fans as "Vulcan." 40 Eridani, a triple-star system 16 light-years from Earth, includes a red-orange K dwarf star slightly smaller and cooler than our sun.

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A patch of Martian soil analyzed by NASA's rover Spirit is so rich in silica that it may provide some of the strongest evidence yet that ancient Mars was much wetter than it is now. The processes that could have produced such a concentrated deposit of silica require the presence of water.

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When Dutch astronomer Willem de Sitter proposed a static model of the universe in the early 1900s, he was some 3 trillion years ahead of his time.

Now, physicists Lawrence Krauss from Case Western Reserve University and Robert J. Scherrer from Vanderbilt University predict that trillions of years into the future, the information that currently allows us to understand how the universe expands will have disappeared over the visible horizon.

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An international team of astronomers with the Trans-atlantic Exoplanet Survey today announce the discovery of their third planet, TrES-3. The new planet was identified by astronomers looking for transiting planets – that is, planets that pass in front of their home star – [...]
"TrES-3 is an unusual planet as it orbits its parent star in just 31 hours!," said Georgi Mandushev, Lowell Observatory astronomer.
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A paper in this week's issue of Nature by University of California, Berkeley, geophysicists demolishes one of the key arguments against the past presence of large oceans on Mars.

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Aptly named after the Greek goddess of conflict, the icy dwarf planet, Eris, has rattled the general model of our solar system. The object was discovered by astronomer Mike Brown of Caltech in the outer reaches of the Kuiper belt in 2005.
Its detection provoked debate about Pluto’s classification as a planet. Eris is slightly larger than Pluto.

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Research comparing silicon samples from Earth, meteorites and planetary materials, published in Nature (28th June 2007), provides new evidence that the Earth`s core formed under very different conditions from those that existed on Mars. It also shows that the Earth and the Moon have the same silicon isotopic composition supporting the theory that atoms from the two mixed in the early stages of their development.