Science

NASA’s Kepler mission has confirmed its first planet in the “habitable zone,” the region where liquid water could exist on a planet’s surface. Kepler also has discovered more than 1,000 new planet candidates, nearly doubling its previously known count.

At 10:02 a.m. Eastern time on a beautiful fall day a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket carrying the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL), otherwise known as the Mars Curiosity rover, was launched on its nine month journey to Mars. On board is a Canadian contribution in the form of the Alpha Particle X-Ray Spectrometer (APXS) instrument.

For the first China has docked two of its spacecraft the Shenzhou-8 and Tiangong-1 space lab module.

China has launched the Shenzhou-8 which will attempt to rendezvous and dock with the Tiangong-1 space station module. This is China’s first attempt at a docking and rendezvous between its spacecraft.

NASA’s NEEMO 15 mission with Canadian astronaut David Saint- Jacques onboard is into mission day 5. Today there will be no EVA’s as the crew Crew will do behavioural science projects from inside Aquarius.

According to the German Aerospace Center the ROSAT satellite will reenter the Earth’s atmosphere between 2 pm EDT today and 2 pm tomorrow afternoon and there is the possibility parts of the satellite could hit somewhere in Canada.

A video recap of the top events at NASA this past week including three new flight directors at Mission Control in Houston, the latest on micro-gravity experiments aboard the ISS, Lifetime achievement awards for the Mars Rovers and more.

Ashwin Vasavada the Deputy Project Scientist from the NASA’s Jet Propulsions Laboratory talks about how NASA’s next Mars Rover Curiosity on how it gets it power.

During the three-year trek of NASA’s Mars Rover Opportunity from Victoria crater to Endeavour crater, rover planners captured a horizon photograph at the end of each drive. 309 images taken during the 13-mile journey appear in this video. Video courtesy NASA JPL.

Scientists from the University of Western Ontario in London, Ontario (UWO) have partnered with researchers from the NASA Lunar Science Institute to study crater ejecta – the debris that is launched out of a crater during meteor impacts. They have developed a new theory, which will help future scientists when they examine samples of crater ejecta returned from the Moon, asteroids and terrestrial planets.