NASA’s Kepler Mission K2 team announced the discovery of another new world today, two months after the Kepler spacecraft ran out of fuel on Oct. 30th, and ended its mission after nine years, during which it discovered 2,600 confirmed planets around other stars – the bulk of those now known – along with thousands of additional candidates astronomers are working to confirm.
“The search for planets is the search for life,” said Natalie Batalha, a Kepler mission scientist from NASA’s Ames Research Center. “These results will form the basis for future searches for life.”
“We are ready for Ultima Thule’s science transmission, science to help us understand the origins of our solar system,” said Alice Bowman, mission operations manager for New Horizons, after the New Horizons spacecraft “phoned home” to confirm it had successfully performed the most distant space flyby in history in the early hours of New Year’s Day after being out of contact for 10 hours.
What’s the coldest place you can think of? Forget Antarctica where temperatures plummet to -120ºF (-85ºC), or the dark side of the Moon, where temperatures reach -280ºF (-173ºC) –inside NASA’s Cold Atom Laboratory on the International Space Station, scientists are creating something even colder: the coldest known spot in the universe.
“I think that if we find life elsewhere it’s going to look, at least chemically, very much like modern life,” says evolutionary biologist William Martin at the Heinrich Heine University in Düsseldorf, Germany. “Among the astrobiological implications of our LUCA paper is the fact that you do not need light. It’s chemical energy that ran the origin of life, chemical energy that ran the first cells and chemical energy that is present today on bodies like Enceladus.”
Kilauea, the world’s longest continuously erupting volcano, yielded extraordinary new data collected during an epic, explosive summer –an unprecedented opportunity to monitor an ongoing, accessible eruption that changed the science about how volcanoes behave.
