SCIENCE BOND

Mr Musk has long targeted a trip to Mars and has previously said he can get humans to the red planet by 2026.  His company, SpaceX, is planning "Red Dragon" missions to Mars to test technology for bigger missions.  In a tweet, Mr Musk said that its Dragon 2 spacecraft is "designed to be able to land anywhere in the solar system".  But Mr Musk "wouldn't recommend transporting astronauts beyond Earth-moon region" as the internal area of the spacecraft is only the size of a large car.  "Wouldn't be fun for longer journeys," he said in a tweet.SpaceX has been developing rockets and has a $1.6bn (£1.08bn) contract with Nasa to supply the International Space Station. On Wednesday it won an $83m contract from the US Air Force to launch a satellite for GPS navigation services.  It is a significant win for the company as, for the last decade, Lockheed Martin and Boeing have been supplying space launches for the military. Last Decembe...

Nasa said a problem with a seismometer provided by the French space agency meant the launch could not go ahead.  It is feared the mission could now face a two-year delay.  The InSight spacecraft was scheduled to take off between 4-30 March and land on the Red Planet six months later to examine Mars' geology in depth.  Nasa said it had decided to call off the launch because the agency was unable to fix a leak affecting the seismometer, which required a vacuum seal to cope with harsh conditions on Mars.  The instrument is designed to measure ground movements. "A decision on a path forward will be made in the coming months, but one thing is clear: Nasa remains fully committed to the scientific discovery and exploration of Mars," Nasa's John Grunsfeld was quoted as saying by the AFP news agency. The next time the earth and Mars are favourably aligned for a launch will be in 2018.  The mission is also intended to monitor the temperature on Mars, as wel...

Researchers working on the US space agency's Maven satellite have reported their first big set of results in a clutch of scholarly papers.  These detail how Martian air today is being removed at high altitudes through its interactions with the Sun.  They calculate the rates at which gases escape, and suggest why these rates may have been even higher in the past.  "We're well on the way to answering many of our questions; much further along actually than I thought we would be at this stage," said Bruce Jakosky, the principal investigator on Nasa's Maven spacecraft.  "What we're reporting today is data from just the first 6-7 months from our primary mission.All the observations by previous satellites and landers at the Red Planet indicate that it was once shrouded in a thick blanket of gases, which supported the presence of liquid water at its surface. This is evident in the many landscape features that resemble the  remains of river channels, de...

The planetary conjunction - in which planets appear closer because of their positions in relation to the Sun - has been visible for days and will continue until at least the end of the week. The planets are best seen before sunrise and are expected to appear closest together on Thursday. The next time the planets will come together will be in January 2021. The planets can be seen without equipment towards the east. The best time to see them is just before sunrise because at this time they are high in the skyline but it is dark enough to see them. Binoculars and telescopes can be used to see the planets in more detail. The easiest planet to see, and the one that appears largest, is Venus, which is about 12 times brighter than Jupiter, which appears second largest. Mars is the sky's faintest planet and is some 250 times less bright than Venus. To see Mars it may be necessary to get up an hour before sunrise. He added that all parts of the UK should have at least one ...

Whale rock on Mar One explanation for Whale is a static model, and the other is a dynamic time model," explains Prof Gupta, from Imperial College London.  The latter may be right, and that would be really exciting because it is telling us something about the water budget changing. But the important thing is that we are seeing the interface between the rivers and the lakes.  Whale is a marker for us that they existed at the same time, and that really gives us confidence in particular that we are seeing ancient lake deposits.  At the point when researchers first saw it in pictures came back from Nasa's Curiosity meanderer on Mars, they truly weren't certain what to make of it.   Sitting glad on top of a heap of finely layered mudstones, this coarser sandstone outcrop appeared a bit strange. Along these lines, the group charged the robot to drive here and there for a bit, to take a gander at some other tempting geography in Gale Crater.   Be that as it may, ...