NASA

Blog about NASA activities

Perseverance Valley (Image NASA/JPL-Caltech/Cornell/Arizona State Univ.)

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NASA’s Mars Rover Opportunity is working in an ancient valley on the edge of Endeavour Endeavour’s rim called “Perseverance Valley” examining rocks and driving around the area to carry out a survey of the place. According to plans, once these tasks are completed Opportunity will go down to the lower part of the valley but the maneuver will have to be even more cautious than expected due to a problem encountered in one of the wheels’ steering system.

Spicules observed and simulated (Image NASA IRIS spectrograph/University of Oslo/SST)

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An article published in the magazine “Science” describes a research that provides an explanation of the origins of solar spicules, intermittent plasma jets that propagate from the solar chromosphere to the base of the corona at very high speeds. A team of researchers created computer simulations and compared them with observations made by NASA’s IRIS space probe and the Swedish Solar Telescope in the Canary Islands that confirmed the models’ validity.

The Kepler mission's exoplanet candidates (Image NASA/Ames Research Center/Wendy Stenzel)

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At a press conference, NASA presented the new catalog of exoplanet candidates produced thanks to the observations of its Kepler space telescope. Exoplanet candidates are a total of 4,034 of which 2,335 have been confirmed as actually existing. There are 219 new candidates, of which 10 might be similar to Earth and at the same time be in ​​their solar system’s habitable zone.

An area at the base of Mount Sharp (Image NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS)

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An article published in the journal “Earth and Planetary Science Letters” describes a study of the first samples taken in the lower layers of Mount Sharp on Mars by NASA’s Mars Rover Curiosity. A team of scientists in the ARES Division at NASA’s Johnson Space Center compared the minerals found in the first samples analyzed, which show the different environmental conditions that existed over time.