Planetary news of 2015

There has been many interesting and important things happening throughout the year of 2015, some people discovered that LED lights can affect badly on animals, and new specie of human-like kind called Kennewick Man have also been discovered. There also were few other interesting planetary news as well. Such as water found on Mars and an Earth sized planet in a ‘habitable zone’ around another star found during the Kepler mission.

2015, October 31th NASA announces that their ‘Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft’ has found salt minerals on Mars like in the Figure 1.

[Figure 1] The blue color is the mark of salt minerals.

This could help the scientists to find whether there is or was any living organism on Mars although it will still take them a long time. NASA also announced that they are planning to launch another spacecraft which can be sent back with rocks or some other materials so that the scientists can examined and analysed. Until this happens, their best view of Mars is a picture taken from Maven spacecraft, a space probe designed and which is on a mission to study Martian atmosphere while orbiting around the Mars. Also, over billions of years, the Mars has been losing air by solar storms. I think this could mean that there is higher chance of a creature living or have been living on the planet of Mars. As of now, there’s too small amount of air that it could be difficult for them but, maybe, in the future, there could be discoveries of fossils of the creatures.

[Figure 2] Picture of Kepler 186f and its star

There was another interesting news. NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope, has discovered Earth sized planet orbiting around a smaller sized star than our Sun in the “habitable zone”, Kepler 186f. Habitable zone means that the planet is in a range where water might pool on the orbiting planet. There have been other planets discovered to be in the habitable zone of other stars. However, those planets were all at least 40% larger in size compared to the Earth. It is the first planet to be around Earth size. But this doesn’t mean that the planet has water on the surface, because the temperature in the atmosphere could be too high that the water could all be vaporized before being exposed to be taken a picture. Many scientists think that it could just be a rocky planet with no water. But if the water exists on the surface, there could be life on surface,

may be a highly developed civilization or few multi-cellular organisms. Or nothing. The planet takes about 130 days to orbit once around its star and from its star, the planet only absorbs about one third of what Earth absorbs from our Sun and the brightest moment on Kepler 186f is only about as bright as our sky about one hour before the sunset. So, the sunlight might not be enough for some things like photosynthesis to occur or maybe there is only little amount of water as displayed in the figure 2, we can’t know how much water is on the surface of Kepler.

https://www.sciencenews.org/node/191210?mode=pick&context=166

https://www.nasa.gov/ames/kepler/nasas-kepler-discovers-first-earth-size-planet-in-the-habitable-zone-of-another-star