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NASA has just announced two major breakthroughs in the search for life on Mars: the first is that the Mars Curiosity rover has detected the presence of organic molecules preserved within the bedrock of the Martian soil; the other is that Curiosity has also detected a wide variation in the amount of methane present in the Martian atmosphere that fluctuates with the planet’s seasons. Although NASA cautions that these phenomena could ultimately have non-biological origins, they add to the growing evidence that Mars, once home to a habitable environment, might very well have had lifeforms of its own–lifeforms that may still be living there today.
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Launched in 2000, NASA’s IMAGE (Imager for Magnetopause-to-Aurora Global Exploration) satellite was tasked with studying how Earth’s magnetosphere was affected by the solar wind, imaging plasma streams in the planet’s atmosphere from an orbit that took it 28,000 miles (45,000 kilometers) above the North Pole. NASA considered IMAGE’s initial two-year mission a success, and had approved it for a mission extension that would last until 2010, but in December 2005, the spacecraft went silent, and the space agency declared the satellite lost.
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New observations of the Solar System’s first known interstellar asteroid, A/2017 U1, has revealed new and unusual information regarding our visitor from afar, including its size, color — and that it is shaped like a cigar.

Using the European Southern Observatory’s (ESO) Very Large Telescope (VLT) in Chile, astronomers have found that the asteroid, now named ‘Oumuamua, is a dark red color, much like other Kuiper belt objects that orbit on the extreme fringes of the solar system.
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A recently-published study from NASA has revealed that glaciers in West Antarctica’s Marguerite Bay have increased their flow rate, speeding up by up to 25 percent, an event that has accelerated ice loss in the region from 2 to 3 meters (7 to 10 feet) per year to 10 meters (33 feet). Prior to 2008, the flow rates of the four affected glaciers had been stable for two decades, but a major calving event in 1989 left the bay with little to no ice shelf, leaving them with only grounded ice on dry land — a precarious position for its potential to affect sea level rise.
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