Unofficial: Cosmic

This illustration depicts NASA's next Mars rover, which launches in 2020. Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech NASA's Mars 2020 rover is one step closer to having its own name after 155 students across the U.S. were chosen as semifinalists in the "Name the Rover" essay contest. Just one will be selected to win the grand prize — the exciting honor of naming the rover and an invitation to see the spacecraft launch in July 2020 from Cape Canaveral Air Force The station in Florida. The currently unnamed rover is a robotic scientist weighing more than 2,300 pounds (1,000 kilograms). It will search for signs of past microbial life, characterize the planet's climate and geology, collect samples for a future return to Earth and pave the way for human exploration of the Red Planet. "This rover is the first leg of a round-trip mission to Mars that will advance understanding in key science fields like astrobiology," said Lori Glaze, director of NAS...

In the search for life beyond Earth, astronomers look for planets in a star's "habitable zone" — sometimes nicknamed the "Goldilocks zone" — where temperatures are just right for liquid water to exist on a planet's surface to nurture life as we know it. An emerging idea, bolstered by a three-decade-long set of stellar surveys are that there are "Goldilocks stars" — not too hot, not too cool, and above all, not too violent to host life-friendly planets. Because our Sun has nurtured life on Earth for nearly 4 billion years, conventional wisdom would suggest that stars like it would be prime candidates in the search for other potentially habitable worlds. In reality, stars slightly cooler and less luminous than our Sun, classified as K dwarfs, are the true "Goldilocks stars," said Edward Guinan of Villanova University, Villanova, Pennsylvania. "K-dwarf stars are in the 'sweet spot,' with properties intermediate betw...