Science News

Kepler Shuts Down

On 30 October 2018, the planet-hunting telescope Kepler ran out of fuel. During the nine years of its operational life, Kepler discovered nearly 2,700 strange new worlds we’ve observed. With no fuel, Kepler can no longer orient itself, nor can it transmit data back to Earth.

Rather than a dramatic end, such as Cassini’s plunge into Saturn, Kepler team members have beamed a command to Kepler which triggered a decommissioning sequence. Kepler has shut down its transmitter and fault protection systems, and is now a chuck of metal floating 94 million miles behind Earth.

Opportunity Lost

NASA is planning to end efforts to contact the Opportunity Mars rover, which has been silent for more than five months after a major dust storm. Opportunity, which has been puttering around the Red Planet since January 2004, hasn't contacted Earth since 10 June 2018 after a powerful, mars-wide dust storm blocked the Sun, preventing the rover from receiving power through it's solar panels and putting it into low-power mode.

After the dust storm subsided, controllers began transmitting commands to Opportunity, and listeing for any responding transmissions from the rover. NASA intends to keep pinging Opportunity for a couple more weeks. The termination of active listening will coincide with preparations for the landing of the InSight spacecraft on 26 November.

Active listening may be ending, but NASA will continue to listen for signals from the spacecraft for months to come.

Martian Brine Yields Oxygen?

Salty water buried just beneath the Martian surface could have enough dissolved oxygen to support microbes, and perhaps even simple animal life such as sponges in some places, a new study suggests. This amazing observation could change perceptions of Sol IV's past, present, and future habitability, researchers say.

Water once flowed flowed across Mars' red surface in the ancient past, as observations by spacecraft such as NASA's Viking orbiters, MRO, and the Curiosity, Spirit & Opportunity rovers have shown. Many scientists think the Red Planet even featured oceans billions of years ago.

This surface water disappeared long ago, after Mars lost most of its atmosphere and transitioned to the cold, dry world that we know today. But researchers believe that water may still exist in deeply buried aquifers and in salty brine pockets, some of which may lie just below the surface.

The researchers found that Martian brines could hold enough oxygen to support aerobic microbial life pretty much everywhere, if the requirements of these potential Martian microbes are similar to those found on Earth.