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Info Mag Koyal Group Spirit and Opportunity Top 10 Decade 1 Discoveries Top Rover Scientist Tells Universe Today A Top 10 Decade 1 Discovery by NASA's Twin Mars Exploration Rovers Carbonate-Containing Martian Rocks discovered by Spirit Mars Rover Spirit collected data in late 2005 which confirmed that the Comanche outcrop contains magnesium iron carbonate, a mineral indicating the past environment was wet and non-acidic, possibly favorable to life. This view was captured during Sol 689 on Mars (Dec. 11, 2005). The find at Comanche is the first unambiguous evidence from either Spirit or Opportunity for a past Martian environment that may have been more favorable to life than the wet but acidic conditions indicated by the rovers' earlier finds. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Cornell University January 2014 marks the 10th anniversary since the nail biting and history making safe landings of NASA's renowned Mars Explorations Rovers - Spirit and Opportunity - on the Red Planet barely three weeks apart during January 2004. Due to their completely unforeseen longevity, a decade of spectacular and groundbreaking scientific discoveries continuously flowed from the robot sisters that have graced many articles, magazine covers, books, documentaries and refereed scientific papers. What are the Top 10 Decade 1 discoveries from Spirit and Opportunity? Find out below what a top Mars rover team scientist told Universe Today! Ray Arvidson, the rovers Deputy Principal Investigator and professor at Washington University in St. Louis, has kindly shared with me his personal list of the Top 10 discoveries from Spirit and Opportunity for the benefit of readers of Universe Today. The Top 10 list below are Ray's personal choices and does not necessarily reflect the consensus of the Mars Explorations Rover (MER) team. First some background. The dynamic duo were launched on their interplanetary voyages from Cape Canaveral Florida atop Delta II rockets during the summer of 2003. The now

LETTER: Scientific findings on climate are real, not optional The letter by James Policelli ("America is heading down dangerous path," Jan. 22) is proof that the far right lunatic fringe disavows science. On the next page of that day's paper was a statement by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that 2013 was the fourth warmest year on record. Policelli would likely claim that NOAA is a puppet of the Obama administration and has broadcast false information to further a socialist agenda. (What!) Let's look at some indisputable facts. A comparison of NASA space shots of polar ice caps clearly indicates they are shrinking. Ocean levels have been measured to be rising. (Where do you think the melting polar ice caps go?) As a scientist, I have never been amused by junk science or those who espouse it. As one who helped develop some of the spectroscopic fingerprints used to monitor ozone-destroying man-made molecules in the upper atmosphere, I find the climate change denials of the far right lunatic fringe to be extremely offensive and exceptionally dangerous. This Content: http://www.lehighvalleylive.com/opinion/index.ssf/2014/01/letter_scientific_findings_on.html Koyal Info Group Mag: http://koyalgroupinfomag.com/science.html http://koyalgroupinfomag.com/blog/ Koyal Info Group Mag - Twitter: https://twitter.com/koyalgroup

Info Mag Koyal Group Mars Rover Marks an Unexpected Anniversary With a Mysterious Discovery Ten years ago, NASA's Opportunity rover bounded to the surface of Mars for what was planned to be a three-month exploration. Opportunity is still going today - and still making discoveries. The latest, scientists said on Thursday at a news conference celebrating an anniversary none had expected 10 years ago, is a small rock that seemingly appeared out of nowhere. The rock, whose chemical composition was also unexpected, appears in an image taken Jan. 8. There was no rock in a picture taken of the same spot less than two weeks earlier. "This is strange," said Steven W. Squyres, the principal investigator for Opportunity, during the NASA news conference. But he added, "We don't think anything particularly exotic happened here." Dr. Squyres said the most likely explanation was that as the rover pirouetted at an uphill location, its lame right front wheel, which has not turned for years, dragged across the rock and flicked it out of the ground to its new location. The scientists have not yet spotted the divot where the rock popped out, but that spot may be obscured by the rover's solar panels. Year after year, Opportunity goes farther than anyone dreamed. The expectation had been that it would drive about a kilometer - six-tenths of a mile - before dust accumulated on the solar panels and the batteries drained. Unexpectedly, fortuitous winds periodically cleaned off the solar panels, and Opportunity, as well as its twin, Spirit, continued to operate. Spirit got stuck in a sand dune 2009 and then fell silent in 2010 after it was not able to point its solar panels toward the sun during the winter months. Info Mag Koyal Group Mars Rover Marks an Unexpected Anniversary With a Mysterious Discovery Instead of one kilometer, Opportunity has driven 38.7 kilometers, or about 24 miles, exploring a series of ever larger craters, taking 170,000 pictures along the

When you're working in the yard this summer, take a look up: Using a satellite, NASA scientists are paying attention to how healthy your lawn and garden are. Next month, the agency plans to launch the Orbiting Carbon Observatory-2. Its primary aim is to create a global map of carbon sources and carbon sinks. The OCO-2 mission will provide the most detailed map of photosynthetic fluorescence - that is to say, of how plants glow - ever created. Using this data, scientists should be able to estimate how quickly the world's plants are absorbing carbon from the atmosphere. The applications of the project are wide-ranging, but the science is easy enough to understand. During photosynthesis, a plant absorbs light, then immediately re-emits it at a different wavelength. This is known as fluorescence. In a laboratory setting, botanists can measure the intensity of fluorescence to estimate how actively a plant is photosynthesizing. A satellite could, in theory, detect the light emitted by the world's plants to estimate how much carbon the plants are absorbing. But there has always been a big, fiery problem: the sun.Continue here More discoveries you might want to know about

Perhaps it was too good to be true. Two months ago, a team of cosmologists reported that it had spotted the first direct evidence that the newborn universe underwent a mind-boggling exponential growth spurt known as inflation. But last week a new analysis suggested the signal, a subtle pattern in the afterglow of the big bang, or cosmic microwave background (CMB), could be an artifact produced by dust within our own galaxy. "We're certainly not retracting our result," says John Kovac, a cosmologist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and co-leader of the team, which used a specialized telescope at the South Pole known as BICEP2. Others say the BICEP team has already lost its case. "At this time, I think the fair thing to say is that you cannot claim detection-period," says Paul Steinhardt, a theoretical physicist at Princeton University. From 2010 through 2012, BICEP2 peered at a small patch of the CMB to measure the polarization of the microwaves as it varies from point to point. On 17 March, BICEP researchers announced at a press conference in Cambridge that they had spotted ultrafaint pinwheel-like swirls in the sky. Those swirls, or B modes, are most likely traces of gravitational waves rippling through space and time during the 10-32 seconds that inflation lasted, the BICEP team says, and they fulfill a key prediction of the theory of inflation. Many cosmologists hailed the detection as a smoking gun for that theory.

Science research is a rich mine of valuable knowledge if one knows how to go about it with care and precision. As in all scientific endeavours, there is a system to follow whether one is trying to solve a simple problem such as how to kill garden weeds or improving on Einstein's Theory of Relativity. Even before the advent of the Internet and the unlimited amount of knowledge and information we have available in a matter of seconds, research has generally been misunderstood as a simple process of going to the library (Googling, for most of us today) and getting the data one needs to make a report or "thesis". Unfortunately, this is nothing but a single step in the whole process of scientific research. Academics will call this data-gathering or collating observations. The purpose of scientific research is to observe physical phenomena and to describe them in their operation or functions. The essential question is WHY. Why do things behave as they do? We can predict some things because it is how things are supposed to behave; but we want to know the causes of such phenomena. Discovering the causes through our research, we can then explain these things and use the knowledge to our advantage in many practical ways. That is, we can then build ships that can carry as many people as we can or explain that the moon, like the apple, is falling into the Earth because it is subject to the force of gravitation. Why it never crashes into the Earth is another question which Newton, fortunately, had to settle for us. Science research or what others would call the Scientific Method requires several steps to be considered one. Let us look at them with simple examples for the beginner: 1. Basic or general questions about a phenomenon Sometimes, it all starts with a casual observation followed by a curious question. W