It’s the size of Jupiter, orbits at about the distance of Mercury, and isn’t too far from the temperature range of Earth. Meet Corot-9b, the newest find in the cavalcade of exoplanets and the one its discoverers say is most like the worlds of our own solar system.

“Like our own giant planets, Jupiter and Saturn, the planet is mostly made of hydrogen and helium,” said team member Tristan Guillot of the Côte d’Azure Observatory in Nice, France. “And it may contain up to 20 Earth masses of other elements, including water and rock at high temperatures and pressures” [Space.com]. The large group of astronomers reporting the find in Nature estimate the planet’s temperature at a range between just below zero and slightly above 300 degrees Fahrenheit. It completes an orbit in 95 days, though it’s about 1,500 light years away.

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Here’s one benefit of a storm so ferocious that it rages on for centuries–scientists have plenty of time to observe it, and to wait for technology to improve so they can get an even better look.

The solar system’s biggest storm swirls on the giant gas planet Jupiter; it’s a tempest that goes by the name the Great Red Spot. Now, for the first time, scientists have constructed a detailed interior weather map of the giant storm system using thermal images from the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope and other powerful ground telescopes.

Peering into the Great Red Spot, scientists found that there were surprising weather and temperature variations within the spot and that the dark red area in the spot’s center is actually a warm patch in the storm. The observations are detailed in the journal Icarus, and give researchers a better understanding of circulation patterns within this Jovian storm. Says Glenn Orton, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory astronomer who led the study: “We once thought the Great Red Spot was a plain old oval without much structure, but these new results show that it is, in fact, extremely complicated” [Wired].

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The European Space Agency has released the latest pictures of the Martian moon Phobos, taken by the European Mars Express (MEX) probe during its recent flybys. On one flyby, MEX skimmed just 42 miles above the surface of Phobos, which is the closest any manmade object has ever gotten to the little Martian moon.

The image above is from a flyby that brought MEX within 63 miles of the surface; its High Resolution Stereo Camera took photographs that have a resolution of 14 feet per pixel. The images are being scrutinized by the Russian space agency as it tries to settle on a landing site for its ambitious Phobos-Grunt mission next year–the two potential landing sites are marked by red dots in the picture above. The Phobos-Grunt mission aims to collect a soil sample from Phobos, and then to return the sample to Earth for analysis.

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Elon Musk’s Falcon 9 rocket didn’t get off the ground this weekend, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t cause for excitement. Musk’s company SpaceX completed a successful test-fire of the rocket’s engines, paving the way for a possible real launch in less than a month.

Saturday’s 3.5-second ‘static’ firing of the Falcon’s nine kerosene and liquid oxygen-burning motors took place on a refurbished oceanside launch pad at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida [ABC News]. Success came on the second try for SpaceX. The company’s first attempt came last Tuesday, but launch technicians aborted with two seconds to go. Now the company has passed the hot fire test, and it says the real Falcon 9 launch could happen as early as April 12. However, the accomplishment won’t come easy: SpaceX’s previous rocket, the Falcon 1, took four attempts before it achieved complete success.

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A year and a half ago, the team led by Alexander Kashlinsky of NASA proposed the controversial and ominously named “dark flow,” a massive gravitational force that is tugging at galaxy clusters, and that Kashlinsky says could be coming from beyond the limits of our own visible universe. Now the team is back with a follow-up study in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, and Kashlinsky says the team has tracked the dark flow out twice as far as before.

A quick note on dark flow: The reason Kashlinsky noticed it is thanks to the cosmic microwave background, a signature left over from 380,000 years after the Big Bang that permeates the universe. “The hot X-ray-emitting gas within a galaxy cluster scatters photons from the cosmic microwave background (CMB),” the NASA press release says. “Because galaxy clusters don’t precisely follow the expansion of space, the wavelengths of scattered photons change in a way that reflects each cluster’s individual motion.” Using data from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP), which mapped the microwave background, the team managed to find this tiny effect when they looked at huge clusters of galaxies, and found something totally unexpected.

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You can’t cancel an enormous federal program without hitting pushback, and President Obama is hitting plenty of it over his proposal to end NASA’s Constellation program. In January his budget proposal put forth no funding for Constellation, the space shuttle successor program that included the Ares rockets, Orion crew capsule, and plans to send astronauts back to the moon by 2020. Instead, NASA would become more reliant on private companies to ferry its astronauts to the space station, and would explore new ideas for visiting Mars or nearby asteroids. But the proposal has already ruffled lots of feathers, prompting the President to say he will hold a conference to further outline his plan.

First, many high-profile space experts balked at the proposal. Former astronaut Tom Jones said Obama was surrendering human spaceflight, and Apollo 17 astronaut Harrison Schmitt, one of the last men to walk on the moon, was equally displeased. “It’s bad for the country,” Schmitt said. “This administration really does not believe in American exceptionalism” [Washington Post]. Dissent wasn’t universal; DISCOVER blogger Phil Plait, for one, praised the possibilities for commercial space-faring.

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Over the last year, scientists have discovered that the moon isn’t a bone-dry place, as we previously imagined. Water ice has been spotted not just at the lunar south pole but also the north pole, and scientists have noted that the north pole deposits contain enough water ice to sustain a human lunar base. Now, scientists studying hundreds of pounds of moon rocks brought back by Apollo astronauts have found that samples containing the mineral apatite have minute traces of water.

The new analyses of the samples, revealed last week at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Houston, Texas, show that the evidence of the moon’s water was right under scientists’ noses for almost 40 years–they just didn’t have sensitive enough instruments to detect it. The water levels detected in Apollo moon rocks and volcanic glasses are in the thousands of parts per million, at most—which explains why analyses of the samples in the late 1960s and early 1970s concluded that the moon was absolutely arid [National Geographic].

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Will we ever get a solid answer on what killed the dinosaurs? According to a new “K-T Boundary Dream Team” comprising of 41 international experts, including geophysicists and paleontologists, yes, the question has been settled: An asteroid is indeed to blame.

For years, scientists have argued over different theories of what killed the dinos–including one hypothesis that has gained ground recently, which suggests that massive volcanic activity in India’s Deccan Traps wiped them out 65 million years ago. However, the latest expert panel stuck to the asteroid theory, saying a massive impact wiped out the dinos and more than half of the Earth’s other species. The panel’s review was published in the journal Science.

After studying all the available data on the Cretaceous-Tertiary (K-T) mass extinction, the panel concluded that the catastrophic event was caused by a 6-mile-wide asteroid that struck Earth at an angle of 90 degrees and a speed of about 12.4 miles per second – about 20 times faster than a speeding bullet [Guardian]. The asteroid hit Chicxulub, Mexico, with a force one billion times more powerful than the atomic bomb at Hiroshima [Science Daily News].

The impact of the crash would have triggered large scale fires, landslides, earthquakes that measured 10 on the Richter scale, and subsequent tsunamis, scientists said. Debris loosened by the impact would have shrouded the planet, clouding the skies, causing a global darkness, and “killing off many species that couldn’t adapt to this hellish environment” [Science Daily News], according to study coauthor Joanna Morgan.

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Stardust just can’t seem to stay out of the news. NASA’s comet chaser, named Stardust, returned a sample of celestial material to Earth in 2006 that has produced numerous fascinating findings. Those include the study we covered last week, in which scientists showed that materials that formed near our sun made it out to the far reaches of the solar system to collect on comets. This week, it’s not NASA astronomers making the headlines, but rather citizen scientists who appear to have found the first evidence of interstellar dust in the Stardust samples.

Stardust’s main mission was to gather material from the comet called Wild 2. But on the way, the team deployed a secondary panel of aerogel to try to catch interstellar dust. The researchers hoped to catch 100 or so interstellar grains from the weak but continuous flux in open space. The elements in these grains were forged in stars, but coalesced into grains in the empty space between stars [Nature News]. However, there’s much less dust in interstellar space than there is in a comet tail, and it moves faster, making it harder to catch. When scientists started looking at the sample dropped down to the Utah desert in 2006, it wasn’t clear if Stardust had nabbed any interstellar dust at all.

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China will soon have an outpost in space. The government has announced that its first unmanned space module, the Tiangong-1 (or “The Heavenly Palace”), will be launched next year.

The module will serve as a docking station for other spacecraft before being transformed into a permanent taikonaut residence and space lab within two years of the launch [Nature blog]. It was originally due to launch this year, but now will see flight only late in 2011, due to technical reasons, Chinese officials said. The Tiangong-1 is expected to be 30 feet long and capable of housing three taikonauts; future missions will add other modules to construct a larger Chinese space station.

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Here we are drinking coffee and tweeting and otherwise going about our lives, generally not giving much thought to the protection that the Earth’s magnetic field affords us from the solar wind. But that magnetic field is crucial for our existence. Now, new findings in Science say that this protective shield originated even 200 million years earlier than scientists had previously thought, perhaps protecting the planet’s water from evaporating away and aiding the rise of life on the early Earth.

To know about the planet’s magnetic field three and a half billion years ago, you need iron, which records not only the direction but also the strength of the magnetic field when it forms. In South Africa, study leader John Tarduno and his team found quartz with iron tucked inside that had remained unchanged in all those years. Using a specially designed magnetometer and improved lab techniques, the team detected a magnetic signal in 3.45-billion-year-old rocks that was between 50 and 70 percent the strength of the present-day field, Tarduno says [Science News]. Three years ago he made a similar find in rocks 3.2 billion years old; thus, this find pushes back the Earth’s magnetic field at least another 200 million years.

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Water, water, everywhere! Radar results from a lunar probe have revealed that the moon’s north pole could be holding millions of tons of water in the form of thick ice, raising the possibility that human life could be sustained on Earth’s silvery satellite, NASA scientists said.

A NASA radar aboard India’s Chandrayaan-I lunar orbiter found 40 craters, ranging in size from 1 to 9 miles across, with pockets of ice. Scientists estimate at least 600 million tons of ice could be entombed in these craters [Wired].

Scientists estimate that this amount of water could easily sustain a moon base, or, if the oxygen in the ice was converted to fuel, could fire one space shuttle per day for 2,200 years. Last year, scientists found almost 26 gallons of water ice on the moon’s south pole, by crashing a rocket hull into a cold, dark crater. The crash produced a plume of material that provided evidence of water ice on the moon’s surface.

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Since NASA’s Stardust mission returned in 2006 from its trip of billions of miles collecting the dust of a comet called Wild2 and dropped it samples down to Earth in the Utah desert, the samples have raised all sorts of questions about how comets formed and what the early solar system was like. In a study this week in Science, there’s a new surprise. Scientists say that the comet sample contains chemicals that must have formed in our home turf, the inner solar system.

Lead researcher Jennifer Matzel studies a tiny particle taken from Stardust’s sample, a piece just five micrometers across. In it her team found the mark of materials that would have formed under high temperatures. Matzel, who specializes in using the decay rates of radioactive chemical elements to assess ancient dates, determined that the Stardust particle must have crystallized just 1.7 million years after the oldest solid rocks in the solar system were forming [San Francisco Chronicle]. After that, the researchers says, the particle must have been flung out to the Kuiper Belt, the region of icy comets revolving around the sun at a distance far past Neptune.

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Water, water everywhere. Another pass of Saturn’s moon Enceladus, made by the Cassini spacecraft last November, shows at least 30 geysers blasting water from the moon’s south pole. That’s 20 more than were previously known at that location. In addition, the most detailed infrared map of one of the south pole’s fissures, where jets emanate, indicates that the surface temperature there might be as high as 200 kelvins (-73º Celsius), or about 20 kelvins warmer than previously estimated [Discovery News]. Cassini drew to within about 1,000 miles of Enceladus to measure this geological feature, which is a fracture–one of the moon’s so-called “tiger stripes”–about a quarter-mile deep officially called Baghdad Sulcus.

While 200 kelvins is still a frigid temperature for we humans, research team member John Spencer said it could make a big difference on Enceladus. “The huge amount of heat pouring out of the tiger stripe fractures may be enough to melt the ice underground,” Spencer said. ”Results like this make Enceladus one of the most exciting places we’ve found in the solar system” [Wired.com].

For more info (and some spectacular photos), check out DISCOVER blogger Phil Plait’s post at Bad Astronomy. And see 80beats’ previous coverage of Enceladus below:

Bad Astronomy: Enceladus Is Erupting!
80beats: Cassini Probe Finds “Ingredients For Life” on Saturn’s Moon Enceladus
80beats: Antifreeze Might Allow For Oceans—And Life—On Enceladus
80beats: Does Enceladus, Saturn’s Geyser-Spouting Moon, Have Liquid Oceans?
80beats: New Evidence of Hospitable Conditions for Life on Saturn’s Moons
80beats: Geysers From Saturn’s Moon May Indicate Liquid Lakes, and a Chance for Life
80beats: Cassini Spacecraft Snaps Pictures of Saturn’s Geyser-Spouting Moon

Image: NASA/JPL/GSFC/SWRI/SSI

After more than six years of exploring the Red Planet, the Mars rover Spirit will rove no more. The robotic adventurer is mired in a sand bed, and NASA has officially given up on trying to extricate it.

While it will continue to operate as a “stationary research platform” for the time being, there’s no denying that the rover’s swashbuckling days are over. No longer will Spirit spot an interesting landmark in the distance and gamely trek towards it, with the possibility of a fresh scientific discovery around every corner and under every rock. This photo gallery is a well-deserved eulogy for Spirit, in which we’ll survey its travels and achievements.

In 2003, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory launched Spirit and its twin rover, Opportunity, on a three-month mission to investigate Martian terrain and atmosphere on opposite sides of the planet. The solar-powered rovers surpassed NASA’s wildest dreams, extending their missions by nearly 25 times their anticipated lengths.

Since landing on Mars in January 2004, Spirit has snapped more than 127,000 pictures. The robot probed beneath the worn surface of Mars, analyzing the microstructure of rocks and soil with a sophisticated array of instruments: spectrometers, microscopic imagers, and other tools. Spirit has also gathered strong evidence that water once flowed on the Martian surface, which could have created a hospitable environment for microbial life.

Spirit and its twin rover (which is still traveling on) will be replaced by more advanced machines that will roll onto the Martian soil in the coming decades. But Spirit will be remembered long after its operating system flickers off for good. Like a robotic Neil Armstrong, the rover has earned its place in the space explorers’ hall of heroes.

All text by Aline Reynolds. Image: NASA/JPL/Cornell