NASA's historic first flight of a helicopter on Mars was celebrated this week by Google's search engine. If you head to Google now and type in "Ingenuity" or "Ingenuity NASA", you'll find yourself on the business end of a fun little animation of sorts. Make sure you're using a Chrome web browser to do it, and it'll most likely work best if you're on a desktop computer.
NASA's Ingenuity Mars helicopter successfully took off from the surface of the red planet, hovered, and then landed safely again today, the first example of powered, controlled flight on another planet. The historic experiment is the culmination of a wild ride for Ingenuity, tucked against the belly of the Mars Perseverance rover until it was carefully lowered to the planet's surface earlier this month.
When we think of the dinosaur age, most of us think about gigantic creatures that would've towered over modern humans. Not all of the dinosaurs around millions of years ago were gigantic creatures. Recently, an international 000 of paleontologists discovered a single footprint left by a dinosaur the size of a cat. The dinosaur roamed the Earth about 100 million years ago, and the footprint was discovered in China.
Researchers at the Voyageurs Wolf Project have shared the first-ever video footage from a collar placed on a wild wolf. The video shows the world from the wolf's point of view as it runs through the forest and lives its life in the wild. Researchers note that the wolf, called V089, is a lone wolf and knew how to hunt and catch fish.
A group of researchers from the EPFL Audiovisual Communications Laboratory were allowed to study some of the very first color photographs ever produced. The photos are typically locked in the vaults of museums around the world and are the original photographic plates and images from scientist and inventor Gabriel Lippmann.
NASA has been working hard to get the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter prepared for its first controlled flight on the Red Planet. The helicopter ran into some issues that prevented it from having its maiden voyage into the sky of Mars earlier this month. NASA has worked out all those software issues, and that helicopter is now ready for its test flight.
Archaeologists working at an excavation site in central Nigeria have discovered terracotta pottery pieces, some of which are as old as 3500 years. The pottery pieces show direct evidence that the pods once held honey, which is considered the oldest sweetener known to humanity. Researchers analyze residue found in the shards and found compounds from beeswax suggesting that waxy combs might've been heated in vessels to separate the honey.
We're halfway through April, but amateur astronomers and backyard sky gazers still have some spectacles to look forward to in the nighttime sky. Starting on the 16th of April, the annual Lyrid meteor shower began. Each year that meteor shower kicks off when the Earth travels through what remains of the tail of a comet called Thatcher.
Astronomers have made an interesting discovery of a super-Earth planet that's orbiting a red dwarf star called GJ-740. A red dwarf star is significantly cooler than the Sun, with a surface temperature between 2400 and 3700 kelvin. That is a difference of over 2000 degrees cooler than the Sun.
NASA's new horizons spacecraft reached Pluto on July 14, 2015. In doing so, it became the first spacecraft to investigate the dwarf planet closely. On January 1, 2019, it passed a large 36-kilometer long Kuiper belt object known as Arrokoth. That object is a rocky, icy body in a river of similar comet-like objects that circles the solar system not previously studied.
Researchers have used a new method to extract DNA of Neanderthals from the soil of caves they inhabited to reveal how they came back from near extinction at least twice before finally disappearing from the planet. A new study was published last week showing details of how an international 000 of researchers recovered fragments of Neanderthal genetic material that dated to between 200,000 and 50,000 years ago from cave sediments found in caves in Spain and Russia.
Last weekend we mentioned that there had been a problem during a spin test for the NASA Ingenuity helicopter. NASA mission controllers have figured out a way to fix the issue with software, but the failed test did delay the launch schedule for the helicopter. Plans for the helicopter's first flight are now moving forward after the operations 000 says the aircraft has now completed a full-speed spin.