The search for life in the solar system, whether in rocks from Mars or on a Jovian moon, tops the wish list of a panel of space scientists convened by the National Research Council. Mindful of shrinking budgets, the panel has issued hard-nosed recommendations that identify which planetary science missions NASA should fly in the decade beginning 2013. Even some top-rated missions should be either deferred... 

When cooking up the stuff of life, you can’t just substitute margarine for butter. Or so scientists thought. sciencenewsBut now researchers have coaxed a microbe to build itself with arsenic in the place of phosphorus, an unprecedented substitution of one of the six essential ingredients of life. The bacterium appears to have incorporated a form of arsenic into its cellular machinery, and even its... 

As the sun reawakens from an anomalously quiet period, keep track of solar flares, sunspots and coronal mass ejections with a new iPhone app that puts the real-time status of the sun in your hand. “This is more than cool,” Dick Fisher, director of NASA’s Heliophysics Division, said in a press release. “It’s transformative. For the first time ever, we can monitor the sun as a living, breathing... 

Small robots the size of riding mowers could prepare a safe landing site for NASA’s Moon outpost, according to a NASA-sponsored study prepared by Astrobotic Technology Inc. with technical assistance from Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute. Astrobotic Technology and Carnegie Mellon researchers analyzed mission requirements and developed the design for an innovative new type of small... 

“The world changed today. What I say or do is very minor compared to the significance of what happened to our country today when it was attacked.” So said Expedition 3 Commander Frank L. Culbertson, upon learning of the Sept. 11, 2001, attack on the World Trade Center. This image is one of a series taken that day of metropolitan New York City by the International Space Station’s...