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Many people make a distinction between the origin of life and the evolution of life. In this view, biological evolution refers to the gradual development of the diversity of living things from a common ancestor, while the ultimate origin of life is a separate question. This is a legitimate point, but evolution is about much more than just biology. The evolutionary worldview is that all of physical existence, both living and non-living, arose through purely natural processes. With this broad definition of evolution, abiogenesis--the spontaneous appearance of life from non-living matter--is a necessity. If life did arise on earth by...

MOSCOW – A nuclear-powered spaceship that can carry passengers to Mars and beyond may sound like science fiction. But Russian engineers say they have a breakthrough design for such a craft, which could leapfrog them way ahead in the international race to build a manned spacecraft that can cover vast interplanetary distances. They claim they’ll be ready to build one as early as 2012. In a meeting with top Russian space scientists Wednesday, President Dmitry Medvedev gave the nuke-powered space craft a green light and pledged to come up with the cash to cover its $600-million price tag. “It’s a...

WASHINGTON, Oct. 21, 2009 – A military institution designed to provide emergency communications has moved to new quarters in the Pentagon. Gary Sessums, left, Navy Capt. Rick Low and John Grimes discuss communications capabilities at the new Military Affiliate Radio System office in the Pentagon, Oct. 21, 2009. DoD photo by Sally Sobsey  (Click photo for screen-resolution image);high-resolution image available. John G. Grimes, the former assistant secretary of defense for networks and information integration, cut the ribbon on the new Military Affiliate Radio System office on the fifth floor of the Pentagon today. The facility is packed with shortwave radios, radio-telephone...

This just in from NASA, President Barack Hussein Obama face was found on the surface of Mars! Never before satellite photos have found Barack's face in the sand dunes of Mars and now NASA Scientist ponder how the likeness of Obama has come to form on Mars' surface.

AP: (Absolutely Phenomenal) Barack Hussein Obama has become the first man in history to preemptively step foot on Mars. After such an accomplishment there can be no other accolade possible...or is there? What awaits Mr. Amazing next? One can only think of the many amazing things that their more than mortal man is.

Video of Engine Test Using traditional chemical rockets, a trip to Mars – at quickest — lasts 6 months. But a new rocket tested successfully last week could potentially cut down travel time to the Red Planet to just 39 days. The Ad Astra Rocket Company tested a plasma rocket called the VASIMR VX-200 engine, which ran at 201 kilowatts in a vacuum chamber, passing the 200-kilowatt mark for the first time. "It's the most powerful plasma rocket in the world right now," says Franklin Chang-Diaz, former NASA astronaut and CEO of Ad Astra. The company has also signed...

Scientists have discovered craters in Mars filled with almost pure water ice with the help of UA technology and say they are hopeful that this discovery will lead to possible missions there for astronauts. The High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment, or HiRISE, comprises a team of UA scientists who operate the high-resolution camera that captured the images of ice on Mars’ surface from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. “UA's role was really key,” said Shane Byrne, member of the HiRISE team and assistant professor of planetary sciences at the Lunar and Planetary Sciences Laboratory, the lab HiRISE calls home.

China's first Mars probe mission will be delayed because of Russia's decision to postpone the launch of its mission to the Martian moon Phobos from next month to the year 2011. Russia's Phobos-Grunt mission had been slated to lift off aboard a Zenith rocket in October on a three-year mission to study Phobos and return soil samples to Earth. Yinghuo-1 orbiter was set to be launched with the mission. But Anatoly Perminov, head of the Russian Federal Space Agency, said on the agency's official website Tuesday that the mission will be delayed from October to the next launch window in...

September 24, 2009: Meteorites recently striking Mars have exposed deposits of frozen water not far below the Martian surface. Pictures of the impact sites taken by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter show that frozen water may be available to explorers of the Red Planet at lower latitudes than previously thought. "This ice is a relic of a more humid climate from perhaps just several thousand years ago," says Shane Byrne of the University of Arizona, Tucson. Byrne is a member of the team operating the orbiter's High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment, or HiRISE camera, which captured the unprecedented images. Byrne...

Craters gouged into the ruddy Martian terrain have revealed subsurface water ice closer to the red planet's equator than would be expected, new orbiter images show. The ice also seems to be 99 percent pure, instead of the dirty dust and ice mixture some scientists expected to see, scientists said today.

PASADENA, Calif. -- NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., will host a media teleconference at noon PDT on Thursday, Sept. 24, to discuss new research results from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. The findings will be reported in Friday's edition of the journal Science. NASA will stream audio from the teleconference online.

Neil Armstrong's first small step for man was widely believed to be the start of a long and glorious road to the stars. Forty years after the first Moon landing, the dream has faded. Astronauts have been stuck in low-Earth orbit, boldly going nowhere. American attempts to kick-start a new phase of lunar exploration have stalled amid the realisation that Nasa's budget is too small for the job. And last week, a committee chaired by the aerospace engineer Norman Augustine concluded that "no plan compatible with the … 2010 budget profile permits human exploration to continue in any meaningful way".

A series of huge cracks etched across crater basins on Mars were caused by lakes that have since evaporated, a new study concludes. The cracks were initially thought to have been merely a byproduct of thermal contractions in the Martian permafrost. But a closer examination revealed the cracks were too big for that explanation. Cracks caused by thermal contraction have a maximum diameter of roughly 213 feet (65 meters), according to analytical models.

Mars, Earth’s arid red neighbor, may have had a more active past than previously believed. UT research scientist John Holt and his team have found large reserves of ice buried under rock near the mid-latitudes of Mars, which could mean the planet was once flowing with water. “We haven’t found any evidence of liquid water on Mars yet,” said Holt, who presented his findings Friday. “But it is a possibility.”

William K. Hartmann painted this conception of an asteroid impact on Mars. Similar explosions formed many of craters that international space probes have observed on the red planet. Hartmann, co-founder of the Tucson-based Planetary Science Institute, is an internationally recognized expert on impact cratering and the evolution of planetary surfaces. Among his many contributions to the field, the Meteoritical Society is honoring his discovery of the Moon's giant Orientale impact basin, a discovery he made as a graduate student in 1962 under the direction of space sciences pioneer Gerard Kuiper. The society also is recognizing his development of a...

As America prepares to embark upon a new era of human space exploration, President Obama has commissioned a review of the nation’s human space flight plans. Known as the Augustine Committee, this panel has the important charter of evaluating the current NASA plan... Exploration must be recognized as a national imperative that sustains U.S. leadership in space; a significant increase in human space-flight safety should be accomplished under government leadership; we must leave low Earth orbit and explore destinations beyond; and sustaining robust funding and staying the course are imperative... ...Members of the committee presented their preliminary findings to NASA...

... The most challenging impediment to human travel to Mars does not seem to involve the complicated launching, propulsion, guidance or landing technologies but something far more mundane: the radiation emanating from the Sun’s cosmic rays. The shielding necessary to ensure the astronauts do not get a lethal dose of solar radiation on a round trip to Mars may very well make the spacecraft so heavy that the amount of fuel needed becomes prohibitive. There is, however, a way to surmount this problem while reducing the cost and technical requirements, but it demands that we ask this vexing question: Why...

An image of the Victoria Crater in the Meridiani Planum region of Mars was taken by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. The image was captured at more of a sideways angle than earlier images of this crater. This view is similar to what would be observed by looking out the window of an airplane flying over Mars. The camera pointing was 22 degrees east of straight down (east is at the top of the image).

Enlarge ImageConundrum. Researchers can't predict why methane (red and yellow areas) is so spotty in the Martian atmosphere. Credit: NASA Just as researchers were once again getting their hopes up, a new study undercuts the prospects for martian life. Scientists have discovered that methane in the martian atmosphere, one of the primary signals that biological processes may be at work today on the red planet, is behaving in unexplainable ways. The results challenge the latest evidence suggesting that Mars is--or was ever--inhabited. Mars has been a roller coaster for astrobiologists. In 1996, for example, researchers reported that a martian...

Tonight, when the sun sets, go outside and look southeast. The full Moon is having a close encounter with Jupiter. The two are so bright, you won't even need a sky map to find them.

Cue the music from 2001: A Space Odyssey…they discovered a monolith on the surface of Mars! Here are the details: PSP_009342_1725/PSP_009342_1725_RED.NOMAP.JP2 Image location: X: 6191 Y: 20500 Rotation of image 81.0 degrees.

Glorious citizens of America, this week is your time to unite and commemorate one of the greatest chapters in our nation’s superior history. This week, just days after we celebrated the birth of our nation 233 years ago, we are allowed to pat ourselves on the back for another one of our country’s accomplishments. This act wasn’t just a landmark moment in the history of the U.S., but in the history of mankind. Forty years ago this week, man first set foot on the moon. And it was the day man’s intellect reached beyond its natural bounds and achieved. And...

Wednesday, July 22, 2009 Most of us old enough can remember that remarkable week 40 years ago, when the world held its breath as the United States fulfilled a mission championed by the late Pres. John F. Kennedy -- to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade of the 1960s. On July 20, 1969, that step was taken by astronaut Neil Armstrong.

Two Apollo 11 astronauts called for a manned Mars mission on Sunday, the eve of the 40th anniversary of the first moon landing, while astronaut Neil Armstrong looked back at the steps that paved the way for the Apollo programme. NASA currently aims to return astronauts to the moon by 2020, with the eventual goal of sending astronauts to Mars, in line with a vision for the agency announced by President George W. Bush in 2004. But these plans may change, pending the outcome of a review of human spaceflight plans that is due to be completed at the end...

The first astronauts to walk on the moon want President Barack Obama to aim for a new destination: Mars. On Monday, the Apollo 11 crewmen, fresh from a Washington lecture Sunday in which two of them expressed concerns about NASA getting bogged down on the moon, are meeting with Obama at the White House. In one of their few joint public appearances, the crew of Apollo 11 spoke on the eve of the 40th anniversary of man's first landing on the moon, but didn't get soggy with nostalgia. They instead spoke about the future and the more distant past. Sunday...

No, folks, I just don't think it is going to happen. I fully intend to live well into the middle of this century, but I am afraid I won't see a man on Mars. We will never explore the Martian canals, or make our coffee with melted Martian ice, or fossick for life forms in the defunct volcanoes. We will never conquer the Red Planet. Homo sapiens will flunk the next great test not because we lack the technology, nor even because we lack the money. We will fail, because – 40 years after the Moonshot – it is increasingly...

As a child I was fascinated by astronomy and space, and I hoped to live to see the day when men would travel to the Moon. In 1969 I managed to snag a summer high school internship at Goddard Space Flight Center in Beltsville, Maryland. Thus I was able to be an extremely small part of one of the greatest human achievements when, on July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first human beings to land and walk on the lunar surface. I was like a kid in a solar-system-sized candy store! I was able to watch...

The moon may have been the entire world for a day for Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin 40 years ago, but today he hopes the United States and the world set their sights on a far grander goal: Spreading humanity to Mars and perhaps asteroids and comets.

The second man to step foot on the moon, Buzz Aldrin, took some time away from celebrating the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11's mission to explain his ambitions for space exploration on "Washington Unplugged."

SIX volunteers from Russia and Europe today emerged from a capsule inside a Moscow research facility where they had been locked away for the last three months to simulate a mission to Mars. The six stepped out of the module smiling and in apparent good health after 105 days cut off from the outside world at the isolation facility at the Russian Institute for Biomedical Problems . Dressed in blue overalls like real-life spacemen, the four Russians, a Frenchman and a German were handed bouquets of flowers and waved at well-wishers as they stood arm-in-arm outside the capsule.

Four decades after the first moon landing, NASA is setting its sights on Mars. NASA manager Jesco von Puttkamer talks to SPIEGEL about the lure of the red planet -- and its potential as an alternative base for human life.

For several years, UCLA astronomers have studied GD 362, a peculiarly dirty white dwarf star 165 light-years away in the constellation Hercules. Now they are pretty sure why the atmosphere of this dense, hot but slowly cooling ghost of a once much larger star is so polluted. It ate a planet.

Nasa astronaut Buzz Aldrin, the second man to walk on the Moon, has urged the world to forget about returning to our nearest satellite and head to Mars instead. 'Why do we want to go to go back to the Moon?' he asked. 'Some nations want to go for prestige to say they are 'first' in space exploration in the 21st century and they want Nasa to compete with them.

The NASA astronaut Buzz Adrin has called for the world to press on with establishing a human settlement on Mars to offer the younger generation much-needed objectives. The second person to walk on the moon said that setting up habitation on the surface of the red planet was a "wonderful objective" for humanity. Buzz Aldrin on the moon, 1969 Given the backdrop of the ailing world economy, space exploration could offer younger generations much-needed goals, the 79-year-old said. "I think we need to look quite a way down into the future to inspire our young people with that greatness. "America...

The planet Mars conjures images of red rocks and arid, dusty plains, but as NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander showed last year, it snows on Mars. The stationary robot observed ice crystals falling to the martian surface near the end of its 5-month mission in the arctic Vastitas Borealis plains last year. Today, scientists detail this finding and others in a set of four papers in the journal Science. The research could help shed light on the past and present action of water on the martian surface and characterize the potential habitability of the red planet. Phoenix landed on the red...

For the first time, direct evidence of lightning has been detected on Mars, say University of Michigan researchers who found signs of electrical discharges during dust storms on the Red Planet. The bolts were dry lightning, says Chris Ruf, a professor in the departments of Atmospheric, Oceanic and Space Sciences and Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences. "What we saw on Mars was a series of huge and sudden electrical discharges caused by a large dust storm," Ruf said. "Clearly, there was no rain associated with the electrical discharges on Mars. However, the implied possibilities are exciting." Electric activity in Martian...

We have remained, since our Apollo days, locked in Earth orbit. But five years ago, NASA was tasked with returning to the moon by 2020, rerunning the moon race that we won 40 years ago. Not surprisingly, this new race has failed to ignite the imagination of young Americans -- or their leaders. What we truly need is not more Cold War-style competition but a destination in space that offers great rewards for the risks to achieve it. I believe that destination must be homesteading Mars, the first human colony on another world. By refocusing our space program on Mars...

First unambiguous evidence for shorelines on the surface of Mars, say researchers A University of Colorado at Boulder research team has discovered the first definitive evidence of shorelines on Mars, an indication of a deep, ancient lake there and a finding with implications for the discovery of past life on the Red Planet. Estimated to be more than 3 billion years old, the lake appears to have covered as much as 80 square miles and was up to 1,500 feet deep -- roughly the equivalent of Lake Champlain bordering the United States and Canada, said CU-Boulder Research Associate Gaetano Di...

Several studies in recent years have claimed evidence for shorelines and other features that suggest ancient lakes on Mars. Firm evidence has remained elusive. Now a University of Colorado at Boulder research team claims "the first definitive evidence of shorelines on Mars" in a statement released today.

Some pesky scientists have just pointed out an appalling design error in NASA’s latest attempts to find life on Mars. This is beginning to look like a conspiracy. Does someone not want us to find life on Mars? NASA has tried looking for signs of life on Mars precisely once, in the 1976 Viking mission. The result was positive. The reason nobody says there is life on Mars is that another experiment, part of the same mission, couldn’t find any carbon-based “organic” chemicals in Martian soil. This, NASA decided, overruled the other result: with no carbon present, there could be...

"We often tell ourselves that we are very fortunate living on this planet because we have this strong magnetic shield that protects us from all sorts of things that the cosmos throws at us -- cosmic rays, solar flares and the pesky solar wind," said Christopher Russell, a professor of geophysics and space physics at the University of California, Los Angeles. "It certainly does help in some of those areas but ... in the case of the atmosphere, this may not be true," he said. Russel and others came to this realization while meeting at a comparative planetology conference last...

As first reflected upon through Twitter, Wednesday, June 10, 2009: "Our hearts and prayers go out to the shooting victims at the National Holocaust Museum. The museum itself remembers and honors the lives lost in one of the world's most horrific genocides. To have an act of intolerance further spread hatred at this place of reflection, further adds to the grief. My heart goes out to all those impacted, especially the brave guards who acted so selflessly to prevent further injury. May God Bless the Jewish community." Governor Sarah Palin

The president of a national women's public policy group on Thursday blasted David Letterman's "offensive" jokes about Sarah Palin and her daughter and called on the CBS late-night host to formally apologize. "There's a saying that out of the heart, the mouth speaks, and Letterman's statement reveals a pretty ugly reflection of who Letterman may be," Wendy Wright, president of Concerned Women for America, told FOXNews.com. "When he said those things, they were thought through. He probably kicked them around with his writers who thought it was appropriate to say these reprehensible things." Letterman has been under fire since he...

A collision of Earth with Mercury, Mars or Venus possible in distant future.

ScienceDaily (June 2, 2009) — NASA scientists modeled freezing conditions on Mars to test whether liquid water could have been present to form the surface features of the Martian landscape. Researchers report that fluids loaded with dissolved minerals containing elements such as silicon, iron, magnesium, potassium and aluminum, can remain in a liquid state at temperatures well below freezing. The results of this research appear in the May 21 issue of Nature magazine entitled "Stability Against Freezing of Aqueous Solutions on Early Mars."

Unlike, say, Mars's or Venus's, Earth's atmosphere was thought to be untouchable inside our protective magnetic field. But a new study says the sun is slowly "stealing" our atmosphere -- and at a greater rate than on Mars or Venus. Mars, for example, probably started out with a thick atmosphere similar to Earth's. But without a magnetic field to protect the Martian atmosphere, the solar wind -- actually a stream of charged particles from the sun -- has been eroding it away. Venus also lacks a magnetosphere and is being stripped of its atmospheric covering. Currently its rate of loss...

The Fobos-Grunt mission might pave the way for humanity's first permanent space base—on Phobos, Mars' bizarre moon.Mars has been nothing but bad luck for the Russians. They have launched 20 probes to the planet since 1960, and all either failed or suffered from severe technical problems. But soon—as early as this October—Russia will attempt to reverse its fortunes with one of the most ambitious unmanned space missions ever. Instead of aiming straight for Mars, the Russians are going after Phobos, the larger of its two little satellites and one of the oddest objects around. Their probe, called Fobos-Grunt (“Phobos...

What you are looking at here is the very first image ever taken of the surface of Mars. It was acquired by NASA's Mariner 4 using a television camera, and rendered using crayons. Look closer: After Mariner 3 failed to take images because of a hardware problem, Mariner 4 became NASA's next big hope to get images of the Red Planet. There were going to be ten Mariner missions, but they wanted these badly.The spacecraft did its first flyby on July 15, 1965, at 00:18:36 UT. It took 21 pictures alternating green and red filters, which were saved to...

Science fiction writers have long imagined a future for humans on Mars, and Hollywood has created several movie fantasies about what the experience could be like (with a few improbable aliens added for extra drama). NASA has addressed the possibility of creating human colonies on Mars someday, but so far, only robots have stepped foot on the red soil. How long will we have to wait for science fiction to become a reality? According to Charles Cockell, a microbiologist at the Open University in the UK, humans could go to Mars now. "Technically, we could go today if we wanted...

At first glance it looks like a rocky desert - but this image of the Mars landscape has got space-gazers talking. An oddly shaped space boulder appears to show eye sockets and a nose leading to speculation it might be a Martian skull. Internet forums are full of chatter about the picture, taken by a panoramic NASA camera known as Spirit. One alien-spotter speculated: "The skull is 15 cm with binocular eyes 5 cm apart. The cranial capacity is approximately 1400 cc.