NASA’s space probe Dawn has been sending information about the giant asteroid Vesta since reaching it in July 2011. The many thousands of images captured and various analyses carried out with Dawn’s instruments uncovered new secrets of Vesta such as the varied composition of its surface, the rapid changes in its temperature and clues about its internal structure.
In 1976, the Viking 1 and 2 landers carried out an experiment on Mars that aimed to test the possibility that there was life on the red planet. Some chemical reactions revealed were unexpected but they weren’t regarded as evidence of the existance of life forms. The issue remained controversial and now an international team of scientists who conducted new analysis on the data from that time concluded that probably there’s life on Mars.
On March 14 the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) discovered another dust devil really huge. Astronomers determined its height examining the photographs transmitted by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and established that it’s about 20 km (about 12 miles) high with a column diameter of about 70 meters (about 75 yards). That’s the size of a large tornado on Earth!
