According to NASA, the weather event the rover faced in 2007 had an opacity level around 5.5. Interestingly enough, as nature often does, the current dust storm does have one positive effect for Opportunity: it lessens the degree to which Mars' temperatures plummet in the overnight hours as the dust absorbs heat and raises the ambient temperature surrounding Opportunity. Read More »

NASA broadcasted the event live on its television station, and provided updates to the docking of Expedition 56 to the space station throughout the morning. The carrier was taken off on Wednesday (June 6) and has successfully entered a designated orbit. Gerst will become the next ISS commander. He was a part of an Expedition crew of 40-41. Read More »

Researchers at the PRL believes that the discovery of such planets will help them to study the formation of sub-Neptune or sub-Saturn like planets. It contains at least three rocky planets, the radius of which is equal to or approximately equal to the earth, and the weight is 1.4, 0.9 and 1.3 times the mass of Earth. Read More »

NASA's six-wheeled Curiosity rover drilled into the planet in late 2014 and early 2015. These two rock samples come from the sites which are named as Confidence Hills and Mojave, and they are present at the bottom of Gale Center. This latest finding is the discovery of the first organic molecules on Mars , which - in the context of Earth - are the basis of "all life that we know", said researcher Eigenbrode. Read More »

The planets around red dwarf K2-240 are about twice the size of Earth. "Although the atmospheric temperature of red dwarf stars, around which these planets revolve, is 3,450 and 3,800 Kelvin respectively, nearly half the temperature of our Sun", the researchers said . Read More »

Protomammals formed an important part of the terrestrial ecosystems which is during the Permian Period, and it dates back to almost 229 to 252 million years ago. At the time of the catastrophic late-Permian extinction, some 252 million years ago, the top predators were tiger-sized, sabre-toothed gorgonopsians. Read More »

The conference, organized by the University of Notre Dame in the United States, brought together executives from asset manager BlackRock, BP and Norwegian oil and energy company Equinor, among others. Pope Francis delivers a speech during a meeting with Youth Eucharistic Movement at the Vatican in August 2015. "This is a challenge of epochal proportions", Francis continued. Read More »

Amnesty International, along with a human rights advocacy group in Quebec, are leading an 44-person observer mission to monitor the protests. Trump, who aides say has little interest in multilateralism, resumed his tirade against Canada early on Friday and appeared prepared to exit talks early without a consensus agreement among all seven countries. Read More »

Specifically, the mission's main goal is to try and determine how much water is in the planet's atmosphere and to measure its composition, temperature, cloud patterns, and map its magnetic and gravity fields. Scientists believe Juno was able to pick up the megahertz signatures because its flyby put it closer to the lightning than any spacecraft before it. Read More »

That means the Briton, his teammate Valtteri Bottas as well as both customer teams, Force India and Williams , will be using the same engine that has done the first six races which means it has lost peak power and is potentially getting close to the end of their cycle, meaning failures are more likely. Read More »

It was upgraded to a Category 3 storm on Friday. The center of the storm was located about 455 miles west-southwest of Manzanillo, Mexico. In 2017, the basin saw 18 named storms, 9 of which become hurricanes, with 4 classified as major storms (category 3 or higher). Read More »

The research was published in Science Advances on June 6, 2018. Further, the footprints left behind by its multiple feet suggest that this sea-dwelling animal had paired appendages that raised its body above the ocean floor. The tracks are only a few millimeters in diameter and dot the soft gray limestone found in the Yangtze Gorges region of China . While the researchers are unable to identify the animal behind the footprints, there are three types of living animals with paired ... Read More »

With wind speeds that can top more than 180 miles per hour, hurricanes are not usually thought of as slow. Kossin argues that the slow-down is caused by global warming, which is both increasing rainfall and decreasing wind currents. Adding last year's storms would have made the slowdown a bit more prominent, he said. Experts believe that continued global warming will increase the severity of tropical storms, but they also believe this anthropogenic warming will increase rainfall. Read More »

It will be the second flight for German Alexander Gerst, and the first for the other astronauts, American Serena M. Auñón-Chancellor from Indianapolis and Sergey Prokopyev of Roscosmos. This crew continues the long-term increase in crew size on the United States segment from three to four, allowing NASA to maximise time dedicated to research on the space station. Read More »

There is also a theory that suggests unseen ninth planet lurking beyond Neptune may have kicked up the orbits of these detached objects. What does their collective gravity do? Bumper car-like interactions at the edges of our solar system-and not a mysterious ninth planet-may explain the dynamics of odd bodies called "detached objects", according to a new study. Read More »

After being found near the Malaysia border, the pilot whale was treated by veterinarians while kept afloat by buoys and protected from harmful solar radiation by umbrellas. About 18 billion pounds of plastic are dumped into oceans each year, while more than 300 marine animal species are known to have been killed by plastic pollution in Thailand's waters. Read More »

At that point, one of the only ways to reverse the effects is to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, where it otherwise persists for thousands of years. "We've bought the smallest scalable unit of each piece of technology we have". Commercialization of such plants would allow direct air capture to make a dent in transportation emissions by connecting low-cost renewable energy to low-carbon transportation fuels using Carbon Engineering's AIR TO FUELSTM pathway. Read More »

This places them perhaps even 10 million years before the " Cambrian Explosion " (roughly 541 million years ago), the moment in time which sparked the incredible evolution of life that led to the awesome diversity of species that we see today. Read More »

Similarly, 18 percent consider sending astronauts to Mars to be a top priority. In a national survey of 2,541 USA adults conducted March 27-April 9, 2018, roughly seven-in-ten Americans (72%) say it is essential for the U.S.to continue to be a world leader in space exploration. Read More »

The park report said some in the crowd came within 15 feet of the bison. She is listed as in good condition, according to the release. A crowded boardwalk in the Lower Geyser Basin in Yellowstone National Park on August 18, 2015. In a little over a month, four people have been injured by wildlife in Yellowstone. As noted by Yellowstone officials: animals in Yellowstone are wild and unpredictable, no matter how calm they appear to be. Read More »

That leaves open the possibility that microorganisms once populated our planetary neighbour and still might. This is the first time we've seen something repeatable in the methane story, so it offers us a handle in understanding it. Weintraub. Curiosity's methane measurements occurred over four-and-a-half Earth years, covering parts of three Martian years. Methane, the simplest organic molecule, ranges "between 0.24 to 0.65 parts per billion, peaking near the end of summer in the ... Read More »

SBI has organized event to promote world environment day 2018. Jackie Shroff: Everyday is a World Environment Day. He said in Ghana, the lack of clean drinking water, caused by pollution of most of the rivers and water sources, also exacerbated the problem of the use of plastic or sachet water, since most people in the country depended on sachet water for drinking. Read More »

Aunon-Chancellor took off from the Russia-leased Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on Wednesday, along with Sergey Prokopyev of Russian Federation, who works for Roscosmos, and Alexander Gerst of Germany, who works for the European Space Agency. Read More »

The Chinese and American team led by Dr Shuhai Xiao, from Virginia Tech in the U.S., wrote in the journal Science Advances: "The irregular arrangement of tracks in the trackways may be taken as evidence that the movement of their trace maker's appendages was poorly coordinated and is distinct from the highly coordinated metachronal (wave-like) rhythm typical of modern arthropods ". Read More »

Naturally, the usual UFO fans have jumped on this and are suggesting it's probably aliens - or at least some sign of life on the Red Planet. The rover also found seasonal fluctuations of atmospheric methane. "This is the first time we've seen something repeatable in the methane story, so it offers us a handle in understanding it", said lead author of the second paper Chris Webster of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). Read More »

NASA will webcast Thursday's Curiosity Mars rover discussion on its NASA TV channel , as well as Facebook Live , Twitch TV , Ustream , YouTube and Twitter/Periscope . "It represents months and months of work by our team to pull this off", said Jim Erickson, MSL project manager . As a result, the engineers had to use images sent back by Curiosity to estimate how to get the proper amount of sample, which is in the milligram range, into the laboratory so that it's enough to work with, ... Read More »

Point72 Asia (Hong Kong) has invested 0.32% in Kinder Morgan, Inc . Kinder Morgan, Inc . ( KMI ) performance during the last one year degraded -11.18 percent, while its year to date (YTD) performance showed a negative trend of -6.81 percent. Read More »

As for the moon , it will not retreat from Earth forever. "As the moon moves away, the Earth is like a spinning figure skater who slows down as they stretch their arms out", Stephen Meyers, geoscience professor and co-author of the study said. Read More »

This hypothesized world, dubbed Planet 9 , would be approximately 10x the mass of Earth , 2-4x its diameter, and would have an elongated orbit that takes as much as 15,000 years to travel once around the sun. The young astronomer suggested the distant dwarf planets zoom around the sun like the hands on a clock - some bodies move faster than others but will eventually overlap. Read More »

All three asteroids were first spotted by the Catalina Sky Survey , based in Tucson, Arizona. Video posted on YouTube , from a farm just across the border in South Africa, showed a fireball swiftly descending and getting bigger, and then a blinding flash in the sky. Read More »

Together with the Canadian Plastics Industry Association, the chemistry association has set 2030 as the deadline for ensuring all plastics produced in Canada can be recycled into new products, or recovered. While providing significant benefits, the current use of plastics has many drawbacks. The figures are dizzying as it is estimated that about 5,000 billion plastic bags are used worldwide every year, meaning that nearly 10 million plastic bags are used every minute. Read More »

WATCH: How do we solve the plastic catastrophe? I've replaced using plastic bottles with a metal one. The report noted, by some estimates, as many as five trillion plastic bags are used worldwide every year. According to the United Nations, the theme is an invitation to all to consider the changes that can be made in everyday lives to reduce the "heavy burden of plastic pollution". Read More »

Rescuers had cradled the pilot whale in a shallow canal, their arms wrapped around its slick, shuddering body. Veterinarians removed more than 80 plastic bags from the whale's stomach, said Jatuporn Burutpat , director-general to Thailand's Department of Marine and Coastal Resources in a CNN report . Read More »

Both Kanai and Tingle are now bound for Houston via the Kazakh city of Karaganda where they will undergo further medical tests to complete their mission. But one Kanai tweet in January caused confusion after he mistakenly claimed to have grown taller by nine centimetres just weeks after arriving on board the ISS. Read More »

Mr Lecomte, who plans to swim eight hours a day, will eat, rest and sleep on a boat which will accompany him before being dropped off every morning to where he stopped swimming the previous evening. He is expected to shed more than 8,000 calories a day. "Pollution of the ocean has a big impact", said the father-of-two, who will be gathering oceanographic and medical data for 27 scientific organizations, including NASA. Read More »