The Red Planet has some of the tallest mountains in the solar system. They include Olympus Mons, a volcano nearly three times the height of Everest. It borders a region called the Tharsis plateau, where three equally awe-inspiring volcanoes dominate the landscape. But what geologic processes created these features on the Martian surface? Scientists have long wondered — and may soon know more. NASA and DLR (German Aerospace Center) plan to take the planet’s temperature for the first time ever, measuring how heat flows out of the planet and drives this inspiring geology....

With the launch period for NASA’s Mars Perseverance rover opening in a little less than four months, the six-wheeler is reaching significant pre-launch milestones almost daily at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida. The rover had some components removed prior to being shipped from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California to the Cape in early February. Last week, Perseverance’s assembly, test and launch operations team integrated two components that will play key roles in the acquisition, containment and eventual return to Earth of humanity’s first samples from another planet: the Adaptive Caching Assembly and the Bit Carousel....

It is generally thought that embryonic development and cellular differentiation of animals and humans follows a precise genetic program of spatiotemporal gene expression. However, a number of recent studies suggested that mechanotransduction – the ability of cells to transform mechanical forces into biochemical signals – can also contribute to the regulation of gene expression and thus may play an important role in development. While most of these studies were done in cell culture, the team of Ulrich Technau from the University of Vienna now reports experiments with mechanosensitive gene expression during early development of the starlet sea anemone Nematostella vectensis....

Extreme rises in ocean temperature over an extended period of time are known as marine heatwaves. Their magnitude and frequency have harmful effects on marine ecosystems, threaten marine biodiversity and negatively impact fisheries, aquaculture, and tourism industries. Higher water temperatures associated with marine heatwaves can also cause extreme weather events such as tropical storms and hurricanes. They can also disrupt the water cycle, making floods, droughts, and wildfires on land more likely....

Dying stars swell and cool to eventually become red giants. They produce stellar winds, flows of particles that the star expels, which causes them to lose mass. Because detailed observations were lacking, astronomers have always assumed that these winds were spherical, like the stars they surround. As the star evolves further, it heats up again and the stellar radiation causes the expanding ejected layers of stellar material to glow, forming a planetary nebula....

An alternative positioning system that is more robust and accurate than GPS, especially in urban settings has been developed by researchers of Delft University of Technology, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, and VSL. The working prototype that demonstrated this new mobile network infrastructure achieved an accuracy of 10 centimeters. This new technology is important for the implementation of a wide range of advanced location-based applications, including autonomous vehicles, quantum communication, and next-generation mobile communication systems....

As technology advances, it tends to shrink. From cell phones to laptops—powered by increasingly faster and tinier processors—everything is getting thinner and sleeker. And now light beams are getting smaller, too. Engineers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have created a device that can focus light into a point just a few nanometers (billionths of a meter) across—an achievement they say may lead to next-generation applications in computing, communications, and imaging....

Metallic nanoparticles are key ingredients in products such as sunscreen, cosmetics, diesel fuel, as well as odor-eating socks. This in turn causes them to end up in the soil, with somewhat troubling consequences. Researchers published their findings in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The study examines soybeans growing in soil mixed with two common nanoparticles, nano-zinc oxide, and nano-cerium oxide. It suggests that they can accumulate in crops and stunt bacteria that naturally fertilize soil....

On early Tuesday morning, Dorian’s central pressure had risen and its wind intensity had dropped to category 4 on the Saffir-Simpson scale. In addition, Dorian had experienced an eyewall replacement cycle on September 2, so by Tuesday morning September 3, the geographic extent of its tropical-storm-force winds had expanded. These rain estimates come from the NASA IMERG algorithm, which combines observations from a fleet of satellites, in near-realtime, to provide global estimates of precipitation every 30 minutes....

Venus is an extreme world. With a surface temperature in excess of 840 degrees Fahrenheit (450 degree Celsius) and a surface pressure 90 times that of Earth, Venus can turn lead into a puddle and crush a nuclear-powered submarine with ease. While many missions have visited our sister planet, only about a dozen have made contact with the surface of Venus before quickly succumbing to the oppressive heat and pressure....

Vitamin B3 could have been made on icy dust grains in space, and later delivered to Earth by meteorites and comets, according to new laboratory experiments by a team of NASA-funded researchers. Vitamin B3, also known as niacin or nicotinic acid, is used to build NAD (nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide), which is essential to metabolism and probably ancient in origin. The result supports a theory that the origin of life may have been assisted by a supply of biologically important molecules produced in space and brought to Earth by comet and meteor impacts....

For the first time, researchers have spotted short-term, regional fluctuations in atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) across the globe due to emissions from human activities. Using a combination of NASA satellites and atmospheric modeling, the scientists performed a first-of-its-kind detection of human CO2 emissions changes. The new study uses data from NASA’s Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2 (OCO-2) to measure drops in CO2 emissions during the COVID-19 pandemic from space. With daily and monthly data products now available to the public, this opens new possibilities for tracking the collective effects of human activities on CO2 concentrations in near real-time....

Orion completed the outbound powered flyby at 6:44 a.m. CST, passing about 81 miles (130 km) above the surface at 6:57 a.m. The spacecraft’s speed increased from 2,128 mph (3,425 km/h) before the burn to 5,102 mph (8,211 km/h) after the burn. Shortly after the outbound flyby burn, the spacecraft passed about 1,400 miles (2,300 km) above the Apollo 11 landing site at Tranquility Base at 7:37 a.m. Orion later flew over the Apollo 14 site at about 6,000 miles (9,600 km) in altitude and then over the Apollo 12 site at an altitude of about 7,700 miles (12,400 km)....

NASA’s Cassini Spacecraft will sample an extraterrestrial ocean on Wednesday, October 28, when it flies directly through a plume of icy spray coming from Saturn’s moon Enceladus. The agency will hold a news teleconference at 2 p.m. EDT on Monday, October 26, to discuss plans for and anticipated science results from the historic flyby. The teleconference participants are: Curt Niebur, Cassini program scientist at NASA Headquarters in WashingtonEarl Maize, Cassini project manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, CaliforniaLinda Spilker, Cassini project scientist at JPL...

A new movie shows these opposition images, with contrast enhanced to highlight brightness differences. The bright spots of Occator stand out particularly well on an otherwise relatively bland surface. Dawn took these images from an altitude of about 12,000 miles (20,000 kilometers). Based on data from ground-based telescopes and spacecraft that previously viewed planetary bodies at opposition, scientists correctly predicted that Ceres would appear brighter from this opposition configuration. This increase in brightness, or “surge,” relates the size of the grains of material on the surface, as well as the porosity of those materials....

This new perspective captures the notable Great Red Spot, as well as a massive storm called Oval BA. The storm reached its current size when three smaller spots collided and merged in the year 2000. The Great Red Spot, which is about twice as wide as Oval BA, may have formed from the same process centuries ago. Juno captured Oval BA in another image earlier on in the mission on February 7, 2018....

This will be the fourth year of full operations for SOFIA, with observations planned between February 2018 and January 2019. Research flights will be conducted primarily from SOFIA’s home base at NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center. Highlights from these observations include: The observatory’s newest instrument, the High-resolution Airborne Wideband Camera-Plus, called HAWC+, will continue research with its polarimeter, a device that measures the alignment of incoming light waves. These investigations will help researchers understand how magnetic fields affect the rate at which interstellar clouds condense to form new stars....

Engineers working on NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope met another milestone recently with they completed performance testing on the observatory’s aft-optics subsystem at Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp’s facilities in Boulder, Colorado. Ball is the principal subcontractor to Northrop Grumman for the optical technology and lightweight mirror system. “Completing Aft Optics System performance testing is significant because it means all of the telescope’s mirror systems are ready for integration and testing,” said Lee Feinberg, NASA Optical Telescope Element Manager for the James Webb Space Telescope at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland....

NASA’s upcoming James Webb Space Telescope is designed to view the universe in infrared light, which is invisible to the human eyes, but is very important for looking at astronomical objects hidden by dust. After its launch, Webb will gather infrared light that has penetrated the dusty veil, revealing the galactic center in unprecedented detail. “Even one image from Webb will be the highest quality image ever obtained of the galactic center,” said Roeland van der Marel of the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI), principal investigator on one planned study that will focus on imaging....

The water was only 1 to 2 degrees Fahrenheit (0.5 to 1 degree Celsius) warmer than usual water temperatures in the area, but it increased the glaciers’ flow speeds by up to 25 percent and multiplied the rate of glacial ice loss by three to five times — from 7 to 10 feet of thinning per year (2 to 3 meters) up to 33 feet per year (10 meters). Researchers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, found that the warmer water was driven into the area by winds associated with two global climate patterns: La Niña and the less-known Southern Annular Mode, which involves a change in location of the belt of winds that encircles Antarctica....