We’ve got a Mars rocket in the news, discoveries in space, a rare find in Britain, dinosaur feathers in Canada, and some real-world Frankenscience in Glasgow.
NASA plans to go to Mars in, well, likely our lifetimes. Articles about the proposed Mars rocket appear here and here.
The Space Station crew return; the next crew will launch November 14. Clearly, we have a space-horror flick in the works on that lonely satellite.
Reports of extrasolar worlds just rolling in. Inhabitable moons of gas giants are a possibility, and a planet in binary system has been confirmed:
Informally, astronomers are calling the world “Tatooine.”
Meanwhile, on Earth– Glasgow, to be specific– researchers have taken the first steps, they say, towards creating “life” from inorganic chemicals, a 5-year-old kid in Britain digs a rare fossil, and amber preserves dinosaur feathers in Canada:
See, how do we know those dinosaur feathers don’t just belong to the kind that lived in the Frozen Northern Wastes of Canada?
Because they were found in southern Alberta. Drumheller, Lethbridge, and the other cities in the region get pretty darn hot in the summer. Temperatures in the 40s Celsius are common in the summer. I live in central Alberta, a good 500km north of that. Our summers get into the 30s regularly in the summer, just as we get to the -30s in the winter. For those saddled with less sensible temperature scales, here’s a quick conversion chart:
I really, really hope that this planned Mars mission becomes an actual Mars mission, and doesn’t just languish in the planning stages forever.