NEW SCIENTIST WEEKLY NEWSLETTER No 67, 13 January 2001 DRILLING FOR MARTIANS Meanwhile, there's more engineering excitement at NASA's Center for Mars Exploration at the Ames Research Center in California. If life ever existed on Mars, the only remaining traces may be buried more than a kilometre down. But Martian soil is a mixture of sand, dust and rocks cemented together with mineral salts. Trying to drill into it is about as easy as "digging in a sandpit". Geoff Briggs and his colleagues, however, have developed a metre-long spear which could solve the problem. This new tool has a tip which heats up to 1500 degrees Celsius and "melts pretty much any type of rock". The molten rock then turns to glass, holds the surrounding soil in place, and produces a self-supporting hole which should make it much easier to "get to the bottom" of the Red Planet. http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns227323 OUT OF THIS WORLD When a star wobbles Geoffrey Marcy wants to be the first to know about it. The professor of astronomy at the University of California at Berkeley is a leading authority on planets outside our Solar System and a fierce competitor in the race to find and announce new worlds. Planet hunting is now an intensely competitive business, a bit like Formula 1 racing. We talk to the "Michael Schumacher" of extrasolar exploration, a passionate astronomer who says that to discover how our Solar System fits into the grand scheme of planetary systems would "bring tears" to his eyes. http://www.newscientist.com/opinion/opinion.jsp?id=ns227345 TERRESTRIAL TOT Marcy may be excited by the prospect of learning something about our position in the Galaxy, but Charles Lineweaver has information which indicates that the discovery could be somewhat humbling. By cleverly combining a host of factors that determine the formation and destruction of terrestrial planets, the researcher at the University of New South Wales in Sydney estimates that three-quarters of all Earth-like planets will be on average about 1.8 billion years older than Earth. "This analysis gives us an age distribution for life on such planets and a rare clue about how we compare to other life which may inhabit the Universe," says Lineweaver. In other words, intelligent life on these "older" planets may be so highly advanced that to them we seem little better than bacteria. http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns227327 == You are subscribed to the Europa Icepick mailing list: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Project information and list (un)subscribe info: http://klx.com/europa/
