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In 1976, the Viking program’s orbiter and lander reached Mars, and the lander’s life experiments returned data that the scientists who had designed them had expected to see if living organisms were present in the soil. However, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, fearing that a positive finding about life on the red planet would cause their Mars funding to be diverted to the manned spaceflight program, issued various denials and succeeded in clouding the picture sufficiently to insure that robotic programs would continue.
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This weekend, hundreds of thousands of people will take to the streets for the People’s Climate March, part of the biggest global protest ever to highlight the issue of climate change.

The march will take place in New York on September 21st, ahead of a major United Nations summit that is bringing together government leaders from around the globe to discuss this global emergency. Satellite marches will also take place in a variety of other locations around the world (see http://peoplesclimate.org/global/ for more details).
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NASA has announced that an experimental propulsion system that needs only energy from sunlight appears to produce sufficient thrust to power spacecraft. This means that, once a spacecraft is in orbit, it will be able to accelerate away from the earth to the edges of the solar system, without fuel. This means that travel throughout the solar system is going to become much more possible and far cheaper.
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A recent study could help scientists predict impending floods months before they occur.

The study states that a pair of NASA satellites, known collectively as GRACE, have detected variations in gravitational pull from saturated river basins that appear to be accurate indicators of flooding.

The report, which was published in Nature Geoscience on July 6th, was conducted by hydrologist J.T. Reager and colleagues from the University of California. The team analyzed data which showed that, as river basins absorb water, GRACE recorded a stronger gravitational pull in the region, suggesting that waterlogged ground is more liable to flooding when assaulted by heavy rain or melting ice.
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