An asteroid is hurtling toward the planet and threatens to destroy life as we know it. What can humankind do, other than cower?

Tie the thing down, suggests aerospace engineer David French of North Carolina State University.

He has proposed a way to divert asteroids and other threatening objects by attaching a long tether and ballast.

Is the white stuff in the Martian soil ice or salt? That's the question bedeviling scientists in the three weeks since the Phoenix lander began digging into Mars' north pole region to study whether the arctic could be habitable.
Shallow trenches excavated by the lander's backhoe-like robotic arm have turned up specks and at times even stripes of mysterious white material mixed in with the clumpy, reddish dirt.

salt on mars: Scientists using a Mars-orbiting camera, designed at Arizona State University's Mars Space Flight Facility, have discovered the first evidence for deposits of salt in numerous places

Smallest Planet Outside Solar System Found SPAIN: April 10, 2008 MADRID - The smallest planet discovered outside our solar system has been found by Spanish scientists. "I think we are very close, just a few years away, from detecting a planet like Earth," team leader Ignasi Ribas told a news conference on Wednesday. The rocky planet, with a radius about 50 percent greater than the Earth's, circles a small red dwarf star 30 light years away in the constellation of Leo, said the scientists from Spain's Superior Council for Scientific Investigations (CSIC).

Astronomers using robotic cameras said on Wednesday that they had found 10 new planets outside our solar system, while a second team said they had found the youngest planet yet. The findings add to a growing list of more than 270 so-called extrasolar planets, they told a meeting of astronomers in Belfast, Northern Ireland.

Scientists recently presented fresh evidence of the possibility of water having once flowed on Mars. A nasa spacecraft currently orbiting Mars has captured photographs that depict equatorial ridges

Scientists using data from the High Resolution Stereo Camera experiment onboard European Satellite Agency's Mars Express spacecraft have produced the first

www.marstoday.com Almost every one is curious about the unsolved mysteries of the Red Planet

Incorrect data spurred on the discovery of Pluto