Hasta La Gadget!

NASA’s Kepler spacecraft launched into space from Cape Canaveral on Friday at 10:49 PM EST, beginning an ambitious mission to discover Earth-like planets around other stars, according to Space.com.

The $600 million spacecraft will study the Cygnus-Lyra region of the Milky Way galaxy for at least three years in a planetary census that could potentially realign humanity’s view of its place in the universe, the report said. The craft will orbit the sun once every 371 days, trailing the Earth’s orbit in the process.

“At the end of those three years, we’ll be able to answer, ‘Are there other worlds out there or are we alone?'” said William Borucki, Kepler’s principal investigator at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., in the article. (Image credit: NASA TV)

Maybe Percival Lowell was on to something after all: A new analysis of canal-like features on Mars offers more evidence of flowing water on the planet’s surface, possibly as late as several hundred thousand years ago, according to Scientific American.

Images snapped by a camera on-board the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter show a gully that’s about one kilometer across, with a delta-like fan at the bottom. Researchers discovered an array of craters on the delta’s western portion, and suspect that a large meteorite impact scattered rocks to create what’s called secondary craters, according to the article.

Tracing backwards, the pattern of pockmarks led to a large impact crater about 100 kilometers to the southwest. The crater’s presence helps geologists date the gully, which researchers believe indicates water activity, possibly due to melting snow from an older Martian ice age.

“We had hoped to find the source of these secondary craters, and voilà, we found a link to this big crater,” said lead study author Samuel Schon, a graduate student at Brown University’s Planetary Geosciences Group, in the article.

NASA announced that its Cassini spacecraft has found within Saturn’s G ring a small moonlet that shows up in photographs as a “faint, moving pinprick” of light. Scientists now believe the moonlet is one of the main sources of the G ring and its single ring arc.

The report said that Cassini imaging scientists studied about 600 days worth of images and found the tiny moonlet embedded within a partial ring. NASA estimates that the moonlet is about a third of a mile across (or about 1700 feet).

“Before Cassini, the G ring was the only dusty ring that was not clearly associated with a known moon, which made it odd,” said Matthew Hedman, a Cassini imaging team associate at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., in a statement. “The discovery of this moonlet, together with other Cassini data, should help us make sense of this previously mysterious ring.”

The discovery brings the total of Saturn’s known moons to over 60. Cassini launched back in 1997, employed two really cool slingshot-like maneuvers around Venus to gain thrust for the long trip, and arrived at Saturn in 2004. It’s been taking photographs and doing science out there ever since. For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit saturn.jpl.nasa.gov.

The odds are high that we’re not alone in the universe. In fact, there may be 100 billion Earth-like planets in the Milky Way, or one for every sun-type star in the galaxy, said Alan Boss, a Carnegie Institution astronomer and author of “The Crowded Universe: The Search for Living Planets,” in a new CNN report.

Based on the number of “super-Earths,” or planets several times the mass of the Earth, but smaller than gas giants such as Jupiter, that have been discovered already among the 330 exoplanets we know of outside the solar system, Boss predicts that any of them that have liquid water could also have life.

“Now that’s not saying that they’re all going to be crawling with intelligent human beings or even dinosaurs,” he said in the article. “But I would suspect that the great majority of them at least will have some sort of primitive life, like bacteria or some of the multicellular creatures that populated our Earth for the first 3 billion years of its existence.”

Soon, NASA will launch the Kepler Mission, which contains a telescope that will study 100,000 stars in the Cygnus-Lyra region of the Milky Way for more than three years, the report said, in an aim to detect small dips in a star’s brightness that could indicate the presence of orbiting planets. The mission is scheduled for launch March 5.

A NASA satellite dedicated to monitoring greenhouse gases in the Earth’s atmosphere fell back to earth and crashed about three minutes after launch, CNN reports. The Orbiting Carbon Observatory, a $273 million satellite, would have helped better forecast changes in carbon-dioxide levels and their effect on the Earth’s climate.

“We could not make orbit,” NASA program manager John Brunschwyler said in the article. “Initial indications are the vehicle did not have enough [force] to reach orbit and landed just short of Antarctica in the ocean… Certainly for the science community, it’s a huge disappointment.”

The launch initially went well. But a few moments in, the clamshell-shaped payload fairing failed to separate from the main rocket, according to the report; the resultant exta weight caused the whole thing to come crashing down minutes later. An investigation has already begun into what caused the failure.