SpaceX

SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket fires its engines on a Cape Canaveral launch pad during Saturday's successful static fire test, in preparation for an Oct. 7 launch to the International Space Station.

SpaceX says it successfully test-fired the engines on its Falcon 9 rocket today in preparation for Oct. 7's scheduled liftoff of the California-based company's first official cargo delivery to the International Space Station.

The static-fire test at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida was considered the "last major test" in advance of the launch, SpaceX said in a Twitter update. The rocket was held down while its nine Merlin engines blazed for a couple of seconds on the pad, at the end of a computer-controlled fueling sequence. Data from the test will be analyzed in advance of the scheduled launch at 8:34 p.m. ET on Oct. 7.

This will be the first launch under the terms of a 12-flight, $1.6 billion NASA contract to resupply the space station. In May, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket sent an unmanned Dragon capsule to its first space station hookup, during a NASA-funded demonstration flight. The success of that mission cleared the way for cargo flights to begin in earnest.

Another company, Orbital Sciences Corp., is working on its own launch system for supplying the space station: The first stage of Orbital's Antares rocket is due to roll out next week in preparation for a hold-down test on its Virginia launch pad.

SpaceX is also working on a modified version of the Dragon capsule that could be used to transfer NASA astronauts to and from the space station, beginning in the 2015-2017 time frame. That effort falls under a separate NASA program that is also funding spaceship development efforts by the Boeing Co. and Sierra Nevada Corp.

Watch this brief video of today's static-fire test:

More about SpaceX:

• Cargo launch to space station set for Oct. 7
• Why SpaceX is setting the pace in space race
• Gallery: Ten players in commercial space race
• Cosmic Log archive on the new space race

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

NASA / JPL-Caltech / SSI

NASA's Cassini orbiter captured this view of Saturn on June 15, from a distance of about 1.8 million miles (2.9 million kilometers). The rings' shadow runs across the planet's sunlit side. The speck in the lower left corner is Enceladus, a 313-mile-wide (504-kilometer-wide) moon of Saturn.

NASA's Cassini sent back this big, beautiful, black-and-white picture of Saturn — but what's that little white speck in the corner?

The image, unveiled by Cassini's imaging team on Monday, shows tiny Enceladus at lower left. It's just 313 miles wide (504 kilometers wide), and yet it shines brightly from a distance of 2 million miles or so. Enceladus is arguably as intriguing as Saturn, and here's why: The icy moon has geysers of water spouting up from cracks in its surface, suggesting that there's a deep ocean and perhaps even some sort of life down below.

To get a more imaginative view of Enceladus, check out this posting on the io9 blog, featuring an illustration from "Planetfall: New Solar System Visions," a big, beautiful, full-color coffee-table book by Michael Benson. NPR's Robert Krulwich showed off the same image earlier this month on his Krulwich Wonders blog.

Enceladus is just one of the moons of the solar system that's been soaking up the spotlight lately: Also this month, NASA's Curiosity rover watched Mars' two moons, Phobos and Deimos, pass over the sun's disk during a series of mini-eclipses. The rover won't see such a sight again for 11 months or so. Here's a smooth animation of Deimos' transit from Nahum Chazarra on UnmannedSpaceflight.com. And if you haven't seen it already, you'll want to catch up with the sight of a crescent Phobos in Mars' dusky sky. 

Shine on, Harvest Moon
Our own moon is definitely worth watching over the next few days: Saturday brings a "Harvest Moon" — that is, the full moon that's closest to the September equinox. That's traditionally a good moon to bring in the harvest by, since it lights up the whole night for late-working farmers.

The Harvest Moon also can serve as a guidepost for finding the planet Uranus in the night sky, although the moon's glare interferes with the view this weekend. If you'd like some extra help, the Slooh Space Camera is planning a couple of online viewing parties over the weekend — with Uranus as the guest of honor. Video feeds will be coming in to the Slooh website from a variety of observatories, and a panel of experts will provide commentary. The first show begins at 7 p.m. ET on Saturday, with an encore performance at 10.

Next week, the moon continues to act as a guide, as Sky & Telescope's Alan M. MacRobert explains. On Oct. 3, the moon lingers near the Pleiades star cluster. The next night, it sits near the bright red star Aldebaran in the constellation Taurus. And on Oct. 5, the waning moon hangs out with Jupiter, starting around 10 p.m.

This weekend is also a good time to look for the International Space Station as well as the European Space Agency's Automated Transfer Vehicle, which undocked from the station today. To find out when and where to look, check out NASA's satellite sighting database.

Where in the Cosmos
Cassini's picture of Saturn and Enceladus served as today's "Where in the Cosmos" picture puzzle on the Cosmic Log Facebook page. It took just a few minutes for Ian Slota to solve the riddle and report that the speck in the picture was Enceladus. As a reward, I'm sending Ian a pair of big, beautiful, cardboard 3-D glasses, courtesy of Microsoft Research's WorldWide Telescope project. Those glasses will come in handy for seeing 3-D pictures of Saturn's moons. Click the "like" button for the Cosmic Log Facebook page, and you too may be a winner in next week's "Where in the Cosmos" game.

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ circles. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

A close look at pebble-filled layers of rock has convinced scientists that NASA's Curiosity rover is driving through a dried-up stream bed on Mars where water flowed vigorously billions of years ago. They say it's the kind of place that just might have supported life when the planet was young.

"This is a rock that was formed in the presence of water," Caltech's John Grotzinger, project scientist for the $2.5 billion Mars Science Laboratory mission, said today during a televised news conference at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.

The evidence is in the shape, size and composition of the rocks that Curiosity came across at multiple sites during its landing on Aug. 5. Conglomerate rocks, consisting of pebbles cemented together within layers of sediment, were seen at three sites:

• Goulburn, a bedrock formation that was exposed by the blast from Curiosity's descent.
• Link, a rock outcrop that was seen once Curiosity headed out from the landing site.
• Hottah, an uplifted slab of craggy rock that was given a visual inspection two weeks ago.

Hottah in particular showed clear evidence of rounded pebbles that were too big to be smoothed by the action of the wind. Some of the rocks are as big as golf balls. The best explanation for the gravelly pebbles was that they were eroded by the vigorous flow of water, said Curiosity science team member Rebecca Williams, a senior scientist at the Arizona-based Planetary Science Institute.

The Hottah slab, which measures 4 to 6 inches (10 to 15 centimeters) thick, looks as if "somebody came along the surface of Mars with a jackhammer and lifted up a sidewalk that you might see in downtown LA, sort of like in a construction site," Grotzinger said.

NASA / JPL-Caltech / MSSS

A closeup view of the "Hottah" rock outcrop shows the characteristic pebbly rock that is associated with the action of a flowing stream. Broken surfaces of the outcrop have rounded, gravel clasts, such as the one circled in white, which is about 1.2 inches (3 centimeters) across. The rock formation was named after Hottah Lake in Canada's Northwest Territories.

NASA / JPL-Caltech / MSSS / PSI

This set of images compares the Link outcrop of rocks on Mars (left) with similar rocks seen on Earth (right). The image of Link, obtained by NASA's Curiosity rover, shows rounded gravel fragments, or clasts, up to a couple of inches (few centimeters) wide, within the rock outcrop. In accordance with the Mars mission's tradition, Link takes its name from a rock formation in Canada's Northwest Territories.

The evidence from the ground meshes well with the evidence from orbit indicating that Curiosity is near an 11-mile-wide (18-kilometer-wide) fan of material that may have washed down a channel in ancient times, when Mars was warmer and wetter, according to William Dietrich, a planetary scientist at the University of California at Berkeley.

"These stones ... are very, very revealing to us about the process," Dietrich said. Some previous research has suggested that water flowed on Mars only for brief periods, separated by long, cold, dry spells. That scenario might not have provided enough time for life to get a foothold on the Red Planet in ancient times. But Dietrich said the patterning of the channels within the fan suggested that water streamed through the area for well beyond a thousand-year time scale.

"We can step away from the idea that there was a single burst of water ... that built it all in a day," he told reporters.

Based on the size of the gravel seen by Curiosity, Dietrich estimated that the water moved at a speed of about 3 feet (1 meter) per second, at a depth somewhere between ankle and hip deep.

"Plenty of papers have been written about channels on Mars with many different hypotheses about the flows in them," Dietrich said in a NASA news release. "This is the first time we're actually seeing water-transported gravel on Mars. This is a transition from speculation about the size of streambed material to direct observation of it."

NASA / JPL-Caltech / Univ. of Ariz.

This image shows the topography, with shading added, around the area where NASA's Curiosity rover landed. Higher elevations are colored in red, with cooler colors indicating transitions downslope to lower elevations. The map highlights an alluvial fan of material, apparently issuing from a channel named Peace Vallis. The black oval indicates the targeted landing area for the rover known as the "landing ellipse," and the cross shows where the rover actually landed.

NASA / JPL-Caltech / UC-Berkeley

This image shows a dry streambed on an alluvial fan in Chile's Atacama Desert, revealing the typical patchy, heterogeneous mixture of grain sizes deposited together. On Mars, Curiosity has seen two rock outcrops close to its Bradbury Landing site that also record a mixture of sand and pebbles transported by water. Scientists say the mixture was probably deposited along an ancient streambed.

So far, the scientists' conclusions are based exclusively on visual observations by Curiosity's high-resolution Mastcam imager. Further imagery, along with chemical readings from other instruments on the rover, will likely be used to fill out the story of the ancient stream bed, Grotzinger said.

The main goal of Curiosity's two-year primary mission is to assess how habitable Mars was in ancient times. That's why mission managers chose 96-mile-wide (154-kilometer-wide) Gale Crater as Curiosity's landing site. It has that alluvial fan, which appears to issue forth from a channel that has now officially been designated Peace Vallis. It also has a 3-mile-high (5-kilometer-high) mountain, known as Aeolis Mons or Mount Sharp, which could preserve billions of years' worth of Mars' geological record.

Grotzinger noted that the three requirements for habitability typically listed by astrobiologists are the presence of liquid water, the availability of an energy source (such as sunlight) and the presence of carbon-based compounds that can be used as the building blocks of life. 

"Now we've got a hall pass for the water examination," Grotzinger joked.

Theoretically, a long-flowing stream could be a habitable environment. "It is not our top choice as an environment for preservation of organics, though," Grotzinger said in NASA's news release. "We're still going to Mount Sharp, but this is insurance that we have already found our first potentially habitable environment."

Even if the rover's instruments detect the right kinds of carbon compounds, that would not serve as confirmation of ancient life on Mars. That would "have to wait for another mission," Grotzinger said.  

More from Mars Curiosity:

• See a crescent moon in Martian sky
• Curiosity touches first rock, then takes off
• Mars rover spots mini-moon's transit
• Cosmic Log archive on the Mars mission

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

European Commission

The European Commission's "Science: It's a Girl Thing!" campaign has been retooled.

It's not exactly surprising that males are perceived as more competent in science than females — but researchers at Yale University were surprised to find that even professional scientists showed evidence of such bias. Now the big question is what to do about it.

"Whenever I give a talk that mentions past findings of implicit gender bias in hiring, inevitably a scientist will say that can’t happen in our labs because we are trained to be objective," microbiologist Jo Handelsman, lead author of a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, said in a Yale news release. "I had hoped that they were right."

Nope.

Handelsman and her colleagues asked 127 science faculty members from six institutions to review an application from a senior undergraduate student looking for a job as a lab manager. The faculty members were asked to judge how competent the applicant was, how much the student should be paid, and whether they'd be willing to mentor the student.

Each researcher looked at the same application — but in some cases the applicant was given a male name (John), and in the other cases a female name was assigned (Jennifer), all on a random basis. When the results were analyzed, it turned out that the sight-unseen male applicant was rated more competent than the female. The mean starting salary offer was $30,238.10 for John as opposed to $26,507.94 for Jennifer. Faculty members were more willing to mentor John than Jennifer.

The data showed a disparity whether the demographic category in question was male or female, young or old, tenured or untenured. "The bias appears pervasive among faculty and is not limited to a certain demographic subgroup," Handelsman and her colleagues wrote.

The researchers emphasized that they weren't suggesting the biases were intentional or stemmed from a conscious desire to hold women back. In fact, they found that the faculty members tended to like Jennifer more than John. That sentiment was generally voiced by faculty women as well as faculty men. It's just that the warm feelings for Jennifer "did not translate into positive perceptions of her composite confidence or material outcomes," according to the PNAS paper.

So what is to be done? "Our results suggest that academic policies and mentoring interventions targeting undergraduate advisers could contribute to reducing the gender disparity," the researchers wrote.

The findings suggest that it's not enough to get young women interested in careers in science, technology, education and math, a.k.a. STEM. There needs to be a conscious follow-through by the folks who do the hiring and mentoring. You can read through the whole study at the PNAS website.

Maybe it shouldn't be so surprising to find out that scientists can be vulnerable to subtle biases, just like other people. Even journalists. Last month, for example, Lund University researchers Daniel Conley and Johanna Stadmark found that far fewer women than men were being invited to write commentaries for the journals Science and Nature.

Conley and Stadmark acknowledged that men tend to outnumber women in scientific fields, particularly at the higher levels, so there's something of a selection effect at work. But they said it was "still fair to conclude that fewer women than men are offered the career boost of invitation-only authorship in each of the two leading science journals." They called on the editors to "extend gender parity for commissioned writers."

Over time, raising the visibility of women scientists (and raising their salaries) will help draw more girls into research and science education. At least that's the idea. Here are a few more efforts that put girl power to work on the science world's gender issues:

'Girl Thing' reloaded: Remember the European Commission program that stirred up a controversy by putting out a glammed-up video about STEM careers for women? Now the EC's "Science: It's a Girl Thing" program is sponsoring a contest for videographers who think they can do better. On the Scientific American website, "Science Goddess" Joanne Manaster explains how to enter. The winning videos will be shown in November at the European Gender Summit at the European Parliament in Brussels. Three winners will each receive a cash prize of €1,500 ($1,930).

Think locally: It's worth looking for organizations that are bringing girl power to STEM on the community level. The best example is Sally Ride Science, which thinks globally and acts locally when it comes to getting girls involved in scientific pursuits. The organization, founded by the late space icon Sally Ride, presents a series of science festivals for girls in grades 5 through 8. The next one is coming up Oct. 27 at Rice University in Houston, with astronaut Wendy Lawrence as the featured speaker. Other organizations involved in girl-power science include Girlstart in Austin, Texas; and Science Club for Girls in the Boston area.

Women chemists in the spotlight: The Chemical Heritage Foundation's video series pays tribute to seven women who have made their mark in chemistry — including Stephanie Kwolek, the inventor of bulletproof Kevlar fiber; Paula Hammond, a pioneer in nanotechnology for drug delivery; and Nancy Chang, a successful biotech entrepreneur. 

Celebrating girl power: Today The Mary Sue is highlighting a series of posters that pay tribute to women scientists such as Marie Curie, Rosalind Franklin and Jane Goodall. And next month, the Royal Society is planning a Wikipedia "Edit-a-thon" to improve the online encyclopedia's articles about women in science. "Female editors are particularly encouraged to attend," the society says. The event in planned in conjunction with Ada Lovelace Day on Oct. 16.

More about women in science:

• Video: Brainiacs by day, cheerleaders at night
• Wanted: More high-tech opportunities for women
• Female astronaut takes command of space station
• Women on the frontiers of physics

In addition to Handelsman, the authors of "Science Faculty's Subtle Gender Biases Favor Male Students" include Corinne A. Moss-Racusin, John F. Dovidio, Victoria L. Brescoli and Mark J. Graham.

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Slideshow: Take a virtual dive

Catlin Seaview Survey

See dozens of wonders from coral reefs and other exotic seascapes, courtesy of the Catlin Seaview Survey.

Launch slideshow

Thousands of images from Australia's Great Barrier Reef and other coral locales are being stitched together into an eye-popping array of 360-degree panoramas for Google Maps' Street View feature — but this million-dollar-plus project isn't just about pretty pictures. It's about sharing the wonders and the woes of the world's coral reefs with people around the globe.

"This will allow the 99.9 percent of the population who have never been diving to go on a virtual dive for the first time," said Richard Vevers, project director for the Catlin Seaview Survey.

In partnership with Google, the Seaview Survey has been mounting a series of expeditions to capture high-resolution imagery of the Great Barrier Reef and other coral reef locales. It's sponsored by Catlin Group Ltd., a global insurance group. The project went through a preview phase back in February, and since then, it has continued to ramp up. Even before the official unveiling, the Seaview Survey has gained more than 1.4 million fans on Google+.

"Now we are actually in full expedition mode," Vevers said. To celebrate Wednesday's official kickoff, the survey is staging its first public real-time dive at the Great Barrier Reef via a Google+ Hangout at 1:30 p.m. ET. It'll be the middle of the night in Australia, but it'll be getting toward midday at the Blue Ocean Film Festival in Monterey, Calif., where Vever and other Seaview Survey organizers are hanging out this week.

Here are some of the 360-degree, Street View-style goodies that are already available via Google Maps:

• Australia's Heron Island Resort, where you swim with sea turtles.
• Lady Elliot Island Underwater, where a manta ray is silhouetted in the sunlight.
• Wilson Island, Great Barrier Reef, where you pop your head up to watch a sunset.
• The Philippines' Apo Island, where you come face to face with coral.
• Maui's Molokini Crater in Hawaii, where divers drift nearby.
• Oahu's Hanauma Bay, where you watch snorkelers pass overhead.

Vevers and his colleagues aim to take 50,000 shallow-reef pictures, using a specially designed SVII camera. When all those images are stitched together into a continuous skein, the 360-degree panoramas will let users navigate their own way through one long virtual Google Maps dive. There'll also be a deep-reef survey, conducted using picture-snapping robots.

Scientists plan to analyze the photos using image-recognition software to get a quick read on coral reef health. That's a crucial issue for the decades ahead. Half of the ocean's coral communities have been lost over the past 40 years, said the survey's chief scientist, Ove Hoegh-Guldburg of the University of Queensland's Global Change Institute. The decline is due to a variety of causes, ranging from coastal water quality to overfishing to ocean warming and acidification, he said.

"The evidence of these changes is there, but people outside the scientific community don't understand the significance of those changes," Hoegh-Guldburg told me. "If we're going to tackle these global issues, we need everyone on the planet to understand what we are in danger of losing, and what we can do to stop the decline."

He said the Seaview Survey's biggest benefit will be to give people a greater appreciation of the world's coral reefs, whether they're Australian business executives or Russian grandmothers.

Sharing the seas' wonders
The Seaview Survey aims to conduct regular expeditions that can be shared via Hangouts and other live events. All the scientific data will be made public via an online Global Reef Record database, Hoegh-Guldburg said. He's also looking into ways to enlist volunteers to analyze coral reef pictures, an idea that's taken from the citizen-science playbooks for Zooniverse and the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.

The survey is due to focus on the Great Barrier Reef and the Coral Sea is due to run until the end of December, and then it'll move on to other locations around the globe, including Hawaii, the Philippines and Bermuda. Hoegh-Guldburg said the survey's tools and techniques are designed to be adapted easily for a wide range of coral reef settings — including countries that haven't been able to assess their own coral reefs.

"Many of these countries know that their reefs are in trouble, but they don't know how much they're losing, or where they're losing the most," Hoegh-Guldburg said. "This can help them prioritize. If you don't prioritize, it's very hard to get traction."

The way he sees it, the Catlin Seaview Survey is coming just in time.

"Everybody is waking up to the realization that this is a critical decade," Hoegh-Guldburg said. "We're making decisions that could haunt us for hundreds of years if we don't get them right. It's now or never." 

More Google Street View goodies:

• Google maps ancient Mexican ruins
• Google tours NASA's Kennedy Space Center
• Take a Death Valley drive with the click of a mouse
• Google view of Amazon (the real Amazon) now live

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

E. Guido / G. Sostero / N. Howes

The crosshairs at the center of this false-color image highlight Comet C/2012 S1 (ISON), which has the potential of becoming as bright or brighter than the full moon in late 2013. Right now, its brightness in the constellation Cancer is around magnitude 18, which would require a 16- to 20-inch telescope for sighting.

A new comet superstar named C/2012 S1 (ISON) is heading for the spotlight starting in November 2013 — but will it perform as some hope it will, or will it be a dud of cosmic proportions?

"This is one to watch, definitely," said Karl Battams, a scientist at the Naval Research Laboratory who monitors comets for the NASA-supported Sungrazer Comet Project. "But the astronomy community in general tries not to overhype these things. Potentially it will be amazing. Potentially it will be a huge dud."

Comet ISON quickly rose to the top of the charts after its discovery, which was based on imagery collected on Friday by the International Scientific Optical Network's 16-inch (0.4-meter) Santel reflecting telescope in Russia. The comet, which was described in an IAU circular on Monday, takes its common name from the network's acronym. Since the discovery, astronomers have gone back through their files to find "pre-discovery" images and calculate the comet's orbit.

That orbit is due to bring Comet ISON incredibly close to the sun — within just 1.1 million miles (1.8 million kilometers) in late November of next year. As a result, current projections suggest it could get very bright. How bright? Various estimates have set the brightest magnitude at -10 to -16. That suggests the comet could become brighter than the full moon — which led Astronomy Magazine's Michael E. Bakich to say it "probably will become the brightest comet anyone alive has ever seen."

Over the next year, you're going to hear a lot of comparisons to stunners of the past, as long ago as the Great Comet of 1680 and as recent as the Great Comet of 2007. You'll also hear comparisons to past letdowns, ranging from Comet Kohoutek to Comet Elenin. You may also hear a fresh wave of doomsday talk, like the ridiculous rumblings that accompanied Elenin's approach.

Don't believe anything you hear about a comet catastrophe — and don't get your hopes up just yet for a comet extravaganza. But do make plans to keep an eye on the sky in late 2013.

Battams said a lot depends on Comet ISON's composition. "It could turn into a huge letdown if it's a comet that's just too fragile and dissipates as it makes its way into the inner solar system," he told me. That's basically what happened to Comet Elenin. Because ISON appears to be a "new" comet coming in from the far-flung Oort cloud, it's tough to predict how the comet will behave.

The comet is currently in the constellation Cancer, as indicated in this star chart from Astronomy Magazine. When the comet hits prime time, a year from now, it should be heading through the constellation Virgo and visible from northern latitudes before sunrise. Here's a night-sky animation from the Remanzacco Observatory that shows how things are likely to go down. 

During the months ahead, astronomers of all stripes will be keeping a watch on Comet ISON and refining their expectations. "I would imagine that by next summer, we should have a much better handle on it," Battams said. In the meantime, check out the chatter on SpaceWeather.com, the Remanzacco Observatory's comet blog and the Comets Mailing List. (And on Twitter, keep an eye on @SungrazerComets.) 

More on comets:

• Comet PANSTARRS due to light up in 2013
• What's up with these sun-diving comets?
• Comet turns into a Christmas star
• Flash interactive: Inside a comet

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

The controversial effort to find out whether a long-lost Leonardo da Vinci masterpiece lies beneath a fresco in Florence has been suspended without resolving a mystery that some have compared to a "Da Vinci Code" riddle.

The mystery surrounds a painting known as "The Battle of Anghiari," or "Fight for the Standard," which was commissioned by city officials for a meeting hall in the Palazzo Vecchio to commemorate a Florentine military victory in 1440. Contemporary accounts indicate that Leonardo began the wall painting in 1505 — but left it unfinished, due to problems he encountered with the experimental technique he was using to apply the paint.

Decades later, the city hall was enlarged and restructured, and in 1563 the Italian artist Giorgio Vasari painted a mural on one of the new walls. In the course of all that remodeling, Leonardo's painting disappeared. Today, it's known only from Leonardo's preparatory sketches and from copies inspired by the original.

Fast-forward to 1975: Maurizio Seracini, an Italian-born engineering professor and expert in art analysis at the University of California at San Diego, was back in his native Florence, studying Vasari's fresco. He noticed that a soldier in the fresco was waving a flag that read "Cerca Trova" (Seek and Ye Shall Find). Did this hint at the location of the lost Leonardo painting?

Over the years that followed, Seracini marshaled the expertise, technology and financial support needed to create a virtual reconstruction of the hall's layout before the remodeling took place. It looked as if there was a gap between the part of the wall where the "Cerca Trova" legend was painted and the older wall beneath. Armed with that information — plus funding from the National Geographic Society and backing from Florence's mayor, Matteo Renzi — Seracini won permission from Italian officials to drill six tiny holes into Vasari's wall and push camera-equipped endoscopic probes into the gap behind it.

The initial results were promising: Seracini said the team found "traces of pigments that appear to be those known to have been used exclusively by Leonardo." This March, National Geographic aired a documentary about the investigation, titled "Finding the Lost da Vinci." Heartened by the findings, Seracini asked for permission to conduct more sophisticated tests. The story was shaping up as a real-life "Da Vinci Code" thriller in the art world. (In fact, Seracini is mentioned in the Dan Brown novel as an art diagnostician who unveils "the unsettling truth" about a different work by Leonardo.)

Italian officials, however, were becoming increasingly unsettled about tampering with the 450-year-old Vasari mural. Some experts questioned whether there was really enough justification to go forward. "Vasari would never have covered a work by an artist he admired so much in the hope that one day someone would search and find it," Discovery News quoted Tomaso Montanari, an art historian at the University Federico II in Naples, as saying. "You would expect such a hypothesis from Dan Brown, certainly not from art historians."

In the end, cultural officials ruled that the scientists could drill one more hole for endoscopic tests, but couldn't do any further drilling after that. That meant the more sophisticated (and more intrusive) tests could not be conducted. Last month, Italian news outlets reported that the National Geographic Society was suspending the project "until further notice." 

Now Discovery News says that Florentine museum officials have given the go-ahead to fill in the six existing holes and take down the scaffolding that was used during the project. "This is how it ends," the Italian newspaper La Repubblica reported, "with strokes of stucco and paint, the search for Leonardo's mythical work."

More Leonardo da Vinci mysteries:

• Dig for Mona Lisa turns up a skeleton
• The anatomy that Leonardo couldn't copy
• Did Leonardo copy his famous 'Vitruvian Man'?
• Leonardo da Vinci ... fashion designer?
• Art experts hold mock 'Da Vinci trial

For more about the unsolved "Da Vinci Code" case, check out Rossella Lorenzi's report for Discovery News.

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

NASA / Boeing via NASASpaceflight.com

An artist's conception shows a deep-space transfer vehicle flying near a exploration gateway platform at right.

A concept that calls for building a deep-space outpost beyond the moon's orbit has stirred up some positive buzz from space pioneers — including Apollo 11 moonwalker Buzz Aldrin.

Over the weekend, the Orlando Sentinel reported that top NASA officials have chosen the construction of a space exploration platform at a gravitational balance point known as EML-2, or Earth-moon Lagrange point 2, as the agency's next major mission. The outpost would be held in an orbit 277,000 miles away from Earth, and 38,000 miles beyond the moon.

The concept has been under study for months, and the Sentinel reported that NASA Administrator Charles Bolden briefed the White House on the preferred plan's details this month. There's been no information from NASA or the White House on the time frame for deciding whether to move ahead with the concept.

Right now, NASA has been focusing on development of the Orion deep-space capsule and the heavy-lift Space Launch System, or SLS. NASA sees Orion and SLS as critical elements for the deep-space construction project. The first unmanned test of the Orion-SLS combination is currently set for 2017. A later test flight, now scheduled for 2021, would send astronauts on a path looping around the moon and returning to Earth without stopping. Getting the EML-2 station ready for human habitation would presumably take longer.

For now, NASA and its partners have committed themselves to supporting operations on the International Space Station through at least 2020. President Barack Obama has set a longer-range goal of sending astronauts to a near-Earth asteroid in the mid-2020s, and to Mars and its moons in the mid-2030s.

The outpost at EML-2 has been cast as an "exploration gateway platform" — a potential stopping point on the way to those farther-out destinations, as well as a potential staging area for lunar missions.

David A. Kring / LPI-JSC Center for Lunar Science and Exploration

The Lagrange points for the Earth-moon system are the places where the gravitational pull exerted by the two celestial bodies come close to balancing out. NASA reportedly favors a plan to put an outpost at the Earth-moon L2 point. Astronauts parked there could teleoperate robots on the lunar far side.

Aldrin has long urged NASA to set up a similar "floating launching pad" at a different balance point between Earth and the moon, called EML-1 or L1, and this weekend he said that platforms at L1 or L2, plus fueling depots for spaceships, would serve as appropriate "intermediate steps" for voyages to Mars and other worlds.

"It's part of my unified space vision," he told me during an international gathering of spacefliers and mission managers at Seattle's Museum of Flight.

Aldrin's vision calls for NASA to lead in the construction of the infrastructure needed for space transport beyond Earth orbit, while leaving the development of facilities on the moon's surface to commercial ventures. A human-tended station at EML-1 or EML-2 could help direct the robotic construction of habitats and factories on the moon, to be occupied at a later time by humans.

"Those are steppingstones in confidence and training for interplanetary spacecraft," Aldrin said.

The eventual goal would be to have a human-tended station on the Martian moon Phobos, directing robots to build facilities for permanent residents on the Red Planet. And then? "We make a commitment to permanence," Aldrin explained. "It's like the Pilgrims on the Mayflower."

Is it doable?
Aldrin noted that he and Apollo 11 commander Neil Armstrong made the first moon landing in 1969, which was 66 years after the Wright brothers' first heavier-than-air flight in 1903. He thought it was technologically doable to plan for a Mars landing 66 years after the moon landing, which would be in 2035. But is it politically doable?

"There's one thing that doesn't exist: leadership. ... We need a presidential decision," Aldrin said. His suggestion? Lay the groundwork for exploration beyond Earth orbit, and get ready for a future president to make a JFK-style "We Choose to Go to Mars" announcement on July 20, 2019 — the 50th anniversary of the moon landing.

"Humanity is destined to explore, settle and expand into the universe," Aldrin said during a panel discussion on Sunday, "but doing so urgently requires a rekindling of America's space program."

Other astronauts issued similar calls for step-by-step exploration: Skylab astronaut Owen Garriott, for example, said "there is a lot of work that needs to be within the orbits of the earth and the moon" before astronauts can be sent to near-Earth asteroids or farther-out destinations. Later, he told me that "I agree with Buzz" on the idea of creating outer-space steppingstones to Mars.

Jim Lovell, who went around the moon during the Apollo 8 and Apollo 13 missions, recalled that he and Apollo 11's Armstrong were in training for their spaceflights when President John F. Kennedy was killed in 1963, ending a White House era that came to be known as Camelot.

Armstrong's death last month could be seen as a similar ending of an era, Lovell said. "The passing of Neil Armstrong closed the book on the Camelot of manned spaceflight," he told the Seattle audience. "Now we have to write a new chapter."

Is it affordable?
In this age of tighter budgets, how much will the spaceflight saga's new authors be able to write? The scenario for the beyond-the-moon outpost calls for using spare parts that were built for the International Space Station, as well as hardware provided by Russia and Italy. But even with those money-saving measures, the plan would still call for "modest increases" in NASA's budget — which runs counter to the current expectation that NASA will have to cope with lower funding levels going forward.

There are also technical questions to resolve: For example, how will astronauts cope with the higher radiation levels in deep space? NASA has been studying various schemes for radiation shielding, but none of those concepts is currently ready for prime time.

Then there's the continuing debate over whether the Orion-SLS system will turn out to be affordable in the long run. Current estimates put the cost of development at roughly $18 billion through 2017, and as much as $35 billion by the time the test program is complete. Charles Lurio, an independent space policy consultant who has long been critical of the SLS program, said it would make more sense to build the deep-space outpost using commercial launch vehicles.

"NASA is trying to find uses for a rocket that Congress forced the agency and the White House to accept," he told me. "You can do this mission much more cheaply using rockets such as Falcon Heavy, Falcon 9, Atlas and fuel depots. Mega rockets like the SLS are for showing off, not for serious space exploration.”

What do you think of the idea of building an outpost beyond the moon? How would you balance space ambitions and budget realities? Feel free to weigh in with your comments below.

More about future frontiers:

• Gallery: Seven out-of-this-world destinations
• Romney lays out his policy for space exploration
• NASA considers outpost beyond moon's far side
• Commentary: From the earth to the moon, then beyond

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Sending your child's toy train into the stratosphere is no mean feat, but turning that train into an animated character requires a special blend of mechanical and computer-generated magic. Ron Fugelseth just happened to be the right magician for the job, as evidenced by the video that he and his 4-year-old son Jayden created.

Fugelseth's video traces the flight of his son's silver train, named Stanley, to an altitude of 18 miles or so. From that height, Stanley could see the curvature of the planet with the black sky of space above. The train's face reflects the wonder of the sight — as well as his distress when the helium-filled balloon that got him that high bursts into bits. The animation is what transforms the tale of Jayden's toy train from your garden-variety balloon experiment into ... something wonderful.

"To me, the whole thing about this is the storytelling," Fugelseth, creative director for California-based Oxygen Productions, told me today.

It all started months ago, when Fugelseth saw the video showing the balloon-borne flight of a Lego astronaut. "When I saw that Lego video, I thought, 'I should totally see if I could get Stanley to space,'" he said.

But Stanley is no cheap prop. To Jayden, the train is much more than a toy. "It's been his imaginary friend since he was 2," Fugelseth said. "It's like Linus and his blanket. This never would have popped into my head if it wasn't for that family member, that little white train."

So Fugelseth did his research and assembled the components for a stratospheric flight: a mail-order weather balloon, a palm-size HD video camera, an old cellphone capable of transmitting GPS location readings, a pocket warmer for heat, the necessary batteries, and a foam box for insulation and padding. (Check out the YouTube video description for other details, such as the procedure for letting the FAA know you're sending up a high-altitude balloon.)

Four weeks ago, Fugelseth and his son launched Stanley from Tracy, Calif. Then they waited for the balloon to pop and for the payload to come back down. When Fugelseth lost the cellphone signal, he worried over whether he'd ever be able to recover the precious cargo — but the phone "magically started working again," he said. With a little assistance from Dad, Jayden found Stanley in a cornfield 27 miles from the launch site.

That's when the computer-generated magic kicked in: Fugelseth used video processing software to create the expressions on the toy train's face, just as he did two years earlier for a Jayden-and-Stanley video titled "A Train and His Boy." The trick isn't all that different from what Fugelseth does for his day job, but it's still a challenge. "It's not every day that a client asks for something like manipulating a face on a train," he joked.

Fugelseth finished the 2½-minute video about Stanley's stratospheric voyage on Wednesday night, and since then it's gotten more than 91,000 views and a raft of positive reviews on YouTube. "If any video has ever deserved to go viral, this is it," one viewer wrote. "C-o-o-o-o-o-lest dad in the world. ... Dude, you gave me a warm feeling, looks like there's still hope for the human race after all."

But perhaps the most influential review came from Jayden and his 2-year-old sister. "They just went crazy," Fugelseth said. "They've watched it a million times now. ... One thing that Jayden said was, 'I wish I was a train, so I could go to space.'"

Be patient, Jayden. Maybe someday, you'll fly higher than Stanley ever could.

More near-space adventures
For a more grown-up tale, check out this "Now Is the Time" video presentation, recorded by a trio of space enthusiasts using a weather balloon, a platform made of plastic pipes and two GoPro cameras pointed at an iPhone. The main video is a tribute to spaceflight, but the "behind-the-scenes" video just might be more entertaining: It chronicles the three attempts to get the setup airborne, plus a backstory about the director's efforts to propose to his girlfriend using video from the stratosphere. (She said "yes.") Here are a few more tales of high-altitude high jinks:

• 'PongSats' rise to the edge of space
• 'Star Trek' action figures take flight
• Gemini capsule launched on a string
• Balloons built for future frontiers
• Teens send toy above the clouds
• Twin-balloon airship hits high frontier
• Students reach high for launch photos
• MIT acceptance letter hits the heights

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Chad Blakley

The aurora season is off to a glorious start, as evidenced by this picture from Sweden's Abisko National Park, taken by photographer/guide Chad Blakley. For more of Blakley's work, check the Lights Over Lapland website and Facebook page.

Summer isn't even over in the Northern Hemisphere, but the season of the northern lights is clearly getting an early start.

Saturday's autumnal equinox marks the traditional start of the aurora season in Arctic regions, and with solar activity building up to the top end of its 11-year cycle, we can expect more than the usual allotment of glow-in-the-dark skies. For some reason, this last week of summer has been particularly active on the sun.

"Another day, another coronal hole high-speed stream," the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Space Weather Prediction Center reports today on its Facebook page. That means there's a higher chance of interaction between the electrically charged particles of the solar wind and our planet's magnetic field. SpaceWeather.com's Tony Phillips quotes NOAA forecasters as saying that there's a 25 to 30 percent chance of strong polar geomagnetic storms over the next three nights.

If the geomagnetic buffeting gets too strong, that's potentially bad news for electric-grid managers and satellite operators. But a mild elevation in solar activity is a boon for aurora-watchers, and it looks as if we're experiencing the bright side of a solar upswing right now.

Chad Blakley, a photographer and tour guide for Lights Over Lapland at Sweden's Abisko National Park, says the sights have been impressive — and he has the pictures to prove it. 

"Aurora season has been in high gear for nearly a month in Abisko, and it looks as though this year could be something very, very special," he told me in an email. "We are entering the peak of the solar maximum, and if history is any indicator we should see a marked increase in aurora activity. As you can imagine, I am one very happy man."

Ed Stockard sent in a similarly glowing report from Summit Station, a research facility that's 10,530 feet above sea level on the Greenland ice sheet. "The auroras came on fast and furious, moving and dancing across the entire sky," he told SpaceWeather.com. "Aurora season has definitely begun on top of the ice sheet. Bring on the lights!"

Stockard has already been posting some fantastic pictures to his Flickr gallery. In a follow-up email, Stockard told me more about the Summit Station operation, which is sponsored by the National Science Foundation:

"There are five of us here for what we call the first phase of winter. This lasts between mid-August and early November. At that time, another crew of five takes over until sometime in February. A third phase completes our winter phase until mid-April, when an inflated summer crew comes in. The summer season is busy at Summit with researchers mainly from the U.S. but also around the world, doing their NSF-funded research. Most science involves atmospheric research and is tied to the deep ice core drilled here in the 1990s. ..." 

Check out these images from Blakley and Stockard, as well as a time-lapse video captured by Helge Mortensen in Tromsø, Norway. You can expect to see a lot more of this in the months to come.

Ed Stockard

The northern lights ripple over Summit Station on the Greenland ice sheet.

Chad Blakley

The auroral display takes on different hues over Sweden's Abisko National Park. The color variations are due to the differences in the composition of the atmosphere at different altitudes. The greenish glow dominates, but the aurora can turn reddish at higher altitudes, as seen here. Check out the Causes of Color website to learn more about auroral colors.

More about the aurora season:

• Your guide to the northern lights
• SpaceWeather.com: Aurora gallery
• Space.com: How the northern lights work
• Cosmic Log archive for auroral glories

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, sent via email every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

(c) Martin Pugh

This picture of the Whirlpool Galaxy, also known as M51, won top honors in the Deep Space category and the overall competition for 2012 Astronomy Photographer of the Year. The picture was entered by British-Australian photographer Martin Pugh. Here's what the Royal Observatory says: "This beautifully composed image of the Whirlpool Galaxy combines fine detail in the spiral arms with the faint tails of light that show its small companion galaxy being gradually torn apart by the gravity of its giant neighbour. A closer look shows even more distant galaxies visible in the background."

The Whirlpool Galaxy is one of the most photogenic spirals in the known universe, but not all whirlpools are created equal: Australian photographer Martin Pugh's view of the galaxy, also known as M51, was stunning enough to win him the top prize in the Royal Observatory's Astronomy Photographer of the Year competition.

"It's a remarkable achievement by an amateur astronomer; one of the best images of M51 that I've seen," Marek Kukula, the Royal Observatory's public astronomer and one of the contest judges, said in a news release. More than 800 entries were submitted, and the observatory announced the winners on Wednesday night.

Pugh said via Flickr that he was "absolutely delighted" by the honor — but for him, this isn't exactly a novel experience: He also won top honors in the 2009 competition. 

Sir Patrick Moore, who's best-known for his British TV programs on astronomy, was impressed by the level of professionalism that today's amateurs bring to their sky snapshots. "Many of the pictures have been taken with equipment that was out of the range of the amateur many years ago," he said. "I also like the choice of subjects: photographing people and the night skies is very difficult. The entrants have done very well indeed."

Take a look at these winners, and then click your way through all the favorites at the Royal Museums Greenwich website. You can also scan through thousands of archived entries at the APotY Flickr gallery, and see the photo exhibition at the Royal Observatory through February.

(c) Masahiro Miyasaka

Japan's Masahiro Miyasaka won top honors in the Earth and Space category with this shot of Orion, Taurus and the Pleiades shining in the night sky above an icy landscape. The category is for photos that include "Earthly" things along with an astronomical subject. Miyasaka's entry, titled "Star Icefall," included a poem about the view: "The stars fell from the heavens. / The stars transformed themselves into an icicle. / Stars sleep eternally here."

(c) Chris Warren

The sun shines through the clouds during June's transit of Venus, as seen in this prize-winning photo from Britain's Chris Warren. The picture, captured through a hydrogen-alpha filter, won top honors in the Our Solar System category. Venus is visible as a black spot toward the sun's upper right edge."Our first and only glimpse of the transit before third contact, through a thin patch in the clouds at Blackheath in London," Warren writes.

(c) Jacob von Chorus

Fifteen-year-old Jacob von Chorus of Canada won top honors in the Young Astronomy category with this view of the Pleiades star cluster. "This image was a test to see what would happen with such a long exposure," von Chorus writes. "It was taken near dusk, with only two frames and an hour of exposure. This image has since become one of my best." The Young Astronomy category is for photographers under 16 years of age.

(c) Laurent Laveder

France's Laurent Laveder won a special award for this photo of a Venus-Jupiter conjunction on March 15, taken on the beach at Tréguennec in northwest France. "In this image, Venus is higher and on the right of Jupiter," Laveder writes. "I take my place in the lower right corner of the frame to complete the diagonal formed by me, the two planets, the Pleiades and Taurus. With my red flashlight on my head, I illuminate the beach. At low tide, the sand is wet and is reflecting the blockhouse." Laveder won the People and Space award, for photos that include people in a creative way.

(c) Lorand Fenyes

Hungary's Lóránd Fényes won the Best Newcomer award, reserved for photographers who have taken up the hobby in the past year and have not entered an image in the competition before. This picture shows the Elephant's Trunk nebula, seemingly uncoiling within the star cluster IC 1396 in the constellation Cepheus. "The Elephant's Trunk is my 34th photo," Fényes writes.

(c) Thomas Read

Twelve-year-old Thomas Read of Britain won the Robotic Scope prize with this view of the Sunflower Galaxy (M63), captured online using the Bradford Robotic Telescope in Tenerife. "I love this image, as it shows fantastic detail in the spiral arms," Read writes. "I was curious about the Sunflower Galaxy and how to maximize photographic results for a distant galaxy." The award goes to images taken by robotic or remote telescopes and then processed by the entrant.

More marvelous astronomy shots:

• Slideshow: The World at Night 2012
• MSN UK: Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2011
• Slideshow: Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2010
• All-time top 10 from Astronomy Picture of the Day
• Space Gallery at NBCNews.com

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ circles. To keep up with Cosmic Log and NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, sent to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

As the impresario behind the Ig Nobel Prizes, Marc Abrahams is skilled at sniffing out what seems to be silly science — but often, there's a practical point behind the seeming silliness.

Take Elena Bodnar's bra, for example. No, really. Take it. The bra that Bodnar invented can be converted into two filter masks in the event of a Chernobyl-style radiation leak or other emergency. That combination of laughability and practicality is what earned the Ukrainian physician an Ig Nobel Prize for Public Health in 2009.

Abrahams recounts Bodnar's achievement and many other Ig-worthy innovations in a newly published book, "This Is Improbable," and he'll be adding to the store on Thursday night during the 2012 Ig Nobel Prize ceremony at Harvard University. The webcast gets under way at 7:15 p.m. ET. There'll be paper airplanes flying, Nobel laureates officiating, and opera singers premiering a work titled "The Intelligent Designer and the Universe."

You can expect this year's prizes to highlight improbable but not totally impractical scientific findings such as these nuggets from "This Is Improbable":

• Which ear is better for detecting when someone is telling a lie? If you can only afford to listen with one ear, make it the left one. A 1993 study published in the journal Neuropsychologia found that people did marginally better at discerning truth and lies when they heard it with the left ear only, as opposed to the right ear only. "It works, to the extent it works, only when a man does the lying," Abrahams writes. 

• How can you keep your stamina up when singing at a karaoke bar? A 2003 study published in the Journal of Voice found that karaoke singers who kept themselves hydrated and took one-minute breaks between songs were able to keep singing for more than 100 minutes, as opposed to the 85-minute average for those who weren't allowed to have rest or rehydration. However, the scientists found that there was no difference in the quality of the singing.

• What's the best way to choose up sides for a basketball team? If team captains take alternate turns, the captain who chooses first gets an unfair advantage. It's fairer to go with an ABBABAAB pattern: Captain A makes choice No. 1, Captain B chooses No. 2 and 3, A chooses 4, B chooses 5, A chooses 6 and 7, B chooses 8. The same rule applies to pouring cups of coffee from a coffeepot, by the way. The research was published by the journal Complex Systems in 2003.

• Which restroom stall should I choose? This is one of the great unresolved questions of sanitation science, along with the perennial controversy over toilet-paper orientation. One study suggested that in a four-stall restroom, the stalls on the end are most used. A different study saw indications that there was more action in the middle stalls. "The traces of these intellectual expeditions, deposited over many years in layers upon the ground, form a sort of mental compost," Abrahams writes. "It sits, ripening, for future scholars to uncover."

Abrahams chuckled when I brought up the restroom-stall research during a telephone chat this week. "I think back to that study, and it really doesn't matter," he said. "There are lots of decisions in life you're asked to make every day where it doesn't matter. No matter what stall you choose, there's paper in all of 'em."

But in some cases, even Abrahams derives practical benefit from the strange studies that wind up on the Ig Nobel list. For example, Stanford University philosopher John Perry won the Literature Prize last year for his theory of structured procrastination. Simply put, if you're avoiding the No. 1 task on your to-do list, do task No. 2, 3 or 4 instead. It's even better if the unpleasant task on the top of your list is something you don't really need to do after all.

"When I read that, it really did change things for me," Abrahams said. "I adopted that as one of my personal guides every day. All day long, I'm cheating myself, happily."

The lesson is that seemingly silly science can change your life. That came through loud and clear in last week's Golden Goose Awards, which honored the folks behind the development of lasers, glow-in-the-dark proteins and coral-inspired bone grafts. All three of those innovations sprang from research projects that were at one time or another written off as frivolous or useless. Who knows? Maybe the same story will be told about Thursday night's Ig Nobel Prize winners.

"When anybody looks at any of these people and what they've done, however stunning the story is that you're seeing, that really is just the start of a much better and longer story," Abrahams said. "Unless that person got killed while doing it."

More seemingly silly science:

• 2011 Ig Nobels: Pee pressure and beer-loving bugs
• 2010 Ig Nobels: Slime mold wins again!
• 2009 Ig Nobels: Bra inventor and milkologists
• 2008 Ig Nobels: Formula for Ig fame? Strippers and Coke
• 2007 Ig Nobels: Viagra-using hamsters and the 'gay bomb'
• 2006 Ig Nobels: The science of a blackboard screech
• 2005 Ig Nobels: Fake dog testicles win Ig Nobel acclaim
• 2004 Ig Nobels: Inventors of the comb-over honored
• Book excerpt: The world's wackiest research
• Funny science sparks a serious political spat
• Where do socks go? Silly mysteries solved
• NBC News' 2012 Weird Science Awards
• NBC News' 2011 Weird Science Awards
• NBC News' 2010 Weird Science Awards
• NBC News' 2009 Weird Science Awards
• NBC News' 2008 Weird Science Awards
• Still more whimsy from Cosmic Log

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

The first rock that NASA's Curiosity rover will touch for science's sake on Mars is a pyramid-shaped chunk that's been named in honor of a top engineer who worked on every one of NASA's rover missions — but passed away just days after Curiosity's landing.

Curiosity's study of the rock, dubbed "Jake Matijevic," will dominate the next few days of the rover's operations on Mars, just as its observations of Martian mini-eclipses dominated the past few days.

Jake the rock, which measures about 10 inches (25 centimeters) tall and 16 inches (40 centimeters) wide, isn't all that exotic. It seems to consist of garden-variety basalt, similar to the first Martian rock that NASA's Spirit rover examined eight and a half years ago. And that's exactly the point, according to Caltech's John Grotzinger, project scientist for the Curiosity mission. Jake will provide a good yardstick for sophisticated instruments such as the Alpha Proton X-Ray Spectrometer, or APXS, and the laser-zapping ChemCam analyzer.

By matching up the chemical readings from the different instruments, Curiosity's science team will be able to confirm that the findings from the fancy-schmancy ChemCam are consistent with the readings from the APXS, an upgraded version of a device that was included on the Spirit and Opportunity rovers. Grotzinger told reporters today that it's an opportunity to compare "something which is tried and true with the latest and greatest new technology."

ChemCam can focus on areas that are less than a millimeter (0.04 inch) wide, while the APXS' best resolution ranges around 1.5 centimeters (0.6 inch).

Grotzinger estimated that the testing could begin on Friday — which is the Martian day, or sol, after tomorrow ("solorrow," he quipped). It could take a couple of sols for the rover to reach out its 7-foot-long (2.1-meter-long) robotic arm and use the APXS as well as the fine-resolution Mars Hand Lens Imager, or MAHLI. The rover might have to back up a bit to give the rock a proper zapping with ChemCam's laser. The flashes of light from the tiny laser blasts will be analyzed by an onboard spectrometer to determine the rock's elemental composition.

Remembering Jake
Richard Cook, project manager for the $2.5 billion Mars Science Laboratory mission, said the rock's name pays tribute to Jacob Matijevic, a leading engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory who was involved in NASA's rover missions since Mars Pathfinder and the Sojourner rover in 1997. Matijevic was a Chicago native who earned his Ph.D. in mathematics and came up with the Matijevic Theorem, which was once described as "one of the most beautiful results of recent years in commutative algebra."

Matijevic's obituary in the Chicago Tribune notes that he came to JPL in 1981 and took on a variety of assignments. Eventually, he came to specialize in systems engineering for the Mars rover designs as well as rover surface operations. "He was probably one of the top one or two experts on surface operations here at JPL," Cook said.

Matijevic played a key role in the Spirit and Opportunity rover missions, which were originally planned to last just 90 days on Mars. Grotzinger recalled that Matijevic once said "if this rover lasts six months, it'll probably last six years."

"He seems to have come pretty close," Grotzinger observed.

The engineer switched over from Opportunity to the Mars Science Laboratory mission, but passed away at the age of 64 on Aug. 20, after battling respiratory problems, the Tribune reported.

Grotzinger said Matijevic would have loved dealing with the complexities involved in studying the rock that's named after him. "All that activity and all those considerations are what honor Jake Matijevic so well," he said.

The chief aim of Curiosity's two-year primary mission is to analyze Mars' geology and surface chemistry and determine whether the planet could have been potentially habitable in ancient times. After studying Jake's memorial rock, Curiosity is due to move on to an area known as Glenelg, where three types of geological formations come together.

Since its landing on Mars on Aug. 5, the six-wheeled rover has covered more than half of the quarter-mile (400-meter) distance to Glenelg, and its cameras are getting a better view of the place. Grotzinger said the pictures show thin bands of dark rock that appear to alternate with lighter-toned rock. "As we get closer in to the Glenelg area, we'll understand better and better what these areas are," Grotzinger said. Curiosity is expected to get to the area in a couple of weeks, he said.

NASA / JPL-Caltech / Univ. of Ariz.

This map shows the route driven by the Curiosity rover through the mission's 43rd Martian day, or sol (Sept. 19). By Sol 43, Curiosity had driven about 950 feet (290 meters). The area known as Glenelg is indicated by a red dot and label.

NASA / JPL-Caltech / MSSS

A scan of the Martian terrain looking toward Glenelg reveals areas of light and dark rock.

NASA / JPL-Caltech / MSSS An animated GIF image shows Phobos crossing over the sun, as seen by NASA's Curiosity rover.

Messages from mini-eclipses
The Curiosity team is also planning to receive more pictures of the partial solar eclipses that the rover's high-resolution Mastcam system has observed over the past week. Mark Lemmon, a science team co-investigator from Texas A&M University, said close analysis of the imagery could provide insights into the interior structure of Mars and its two moons, Phobos and Deimos.

Mastcam took hundreds of pictures when Phobos made two passes over the sun's disk, and again when Deimos made one pass. Such transits occur multiple times during a short season, and then they don't occur again for nearly one Earth year. Lemmon explained that the timing of the eclipses could be compared with past sightings to produce precise measurements of how the moons' orbits have changed due to Mars' gravitational tides.

"We can't go inside Mars, but we can use these to tell how much Mars is deformed when the moons go by," Lemmon said. "So we measure the transits very precisely [and] we get information on Mars' interior structure."

Some high-resolution images from Phobos' first transit were sent down to Earth over the weekend, but most of the imagery is still saved in the rover's computer memory on Mars, awaiting the right opportunity for transmission, Lemmon said.

Phobos and Deimos have irregular shapes, and the prevailing wisdom is that they're both asteroids that were pulled into orbit by Mars' gravitational pull. Phobos averages 14 miles (22.2 kilometers) in width, and Deimos is roughly 8 miles (12.6 kilometers) wide. Deimos circles Mars at a distance of 14,580 miles (23,460 kilometers), while Phobos is much closer (5,800 miles, or 9,400 kilometers). Phobos is gradually coming even closer to Mars, which makes the moon's orbit unstable over the long term: One of these days, it will break up into pieces and perhaps produce a ring of debris around the Red Planet.

Fortunately, that day isn't expected to come for 10 million to 15 million years. "Curiosity will be safe for a little while," Lemmon said.

More about Mars:

• How a rover on Mars is blazing a trail on Earth
• Martian moon bites into the sun
• Spheres spark new Martian mystery
• Cosmic Log archive on the Curiosity mission

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

A brand-new reality-TV show premiered today, but this one isn't about aspiring singers or models — it's about chemistry students vying for plum research assignments.

"ChemLab Boot Camp" is produced by MIT OpenCourseWare to encourage students to go for careers in math, science and engineering. The 11-part YouTube video series follows 14 freshmen through a four-week lab course called 5.301 Chemistry Lab Techniques. The geeky grunts have to learn the ropes in the lab under the watchful eye of MIT lab instructor John Dolhun.

The kids in 5.301 have to cope with broken test tubes, spoiled experiments and the challenges of recrystallization. They also revel in the high jinks occasionally orchestrated by Dolhun, including a trick that turns potassium iodide, hydrogen peroxide and dish soap into an erupting volcano of pink foam. The students who pass the course are guaranteed a job in an MIT research lab. The students who fail ... well, is there anything worse for a geek than having the world find out about that on YouTube?

In the first episode, we get to know some of the freshmen, including a serious rap-music fan and kids who like to cover the walls with equations. MIT promises that future installments will show the rise of "Survivor"-style alliances and rivalries, and even the hint of romance. Just like "Survivor," the outcome of the finale is being kept under wraps, even though the show was filmed in January. You'll have to follow every weekly installment to find out how it all turns out.

"We shot at least 100 hours of footage to get what is the finished hour or so of material," Steve Carson, the external relations director for MIT OpenCourseWare, told me today.

The series was produced and directed by former MIT student George Zaidan, who used animations and video diaries to bring the lab culture to life. "I wanted to show that scientists are people — they have relationships like normal people, they make mistakes like normal people," Zaidan said in a behind-the-scenes preview. "A big part of the show is just showing who they are."

The show is part of a broader effort at MIT, funded by the Dow Chemical Co. to encourage interest in science and engineering careers. That means the videos may have to tread a careful line between boring the viewer and sensationalizing the science (which is an issue "Survivor" doesn't have to worry about).

Carson said "ChemLab Boot Camp" makes the grade. 

"What the show does as a whole is to make the idea of working in a lab accessible," he said. "For most high-school students, what goes on in a lab is a mystery. You see all this strange equipment, and people doing strange things. The show incorporates really great animations that explain the chemical reaction going on. ... There's the possibility of failure at every turn, and there's a natural drama associated with that."

More science videos worth watching:

• Mars Curiosity fans make viral video
• Comics go beyond the Higgs boson
• Ph.D. dance-off makes science sexy
• Must-see science videos of 2011

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

A fourth-century fragment of papyrus that quotes Jesus telling his disciples about "my wife" has set off a buzz among scriptural scholars — but this is no "Da Vinci Code" come true. Rather, the "Gospel of Jesus' Wife" is just the latest discovery to suggest how the early Christian church took shape.

Fans of the Dan Brown thriller are already familiar with the theory that Jesus and Mary Magdalene had a husband-and-wife relationship. The basis for such speculation lies in Gnostic gospels that came out in the second, third and fourth centuries, but were left out of the standardized scriptures — texts such as the Gospel of Philip, the Gospel of Mary and the recently reconstructed Gospel of Judas.

Even though only a few phrases can be read on the papyrus fragment that's just come to light, those phrases are consistent with the Gnostic view of early Christianity — which tended to give a more prominent role to women, and particularly to Mary Magdalene. The text, written in the Sahidic Coptic dialect, includes the phrase "Jesus said to them, 'My wife...'" as well as references to a woman named Mary being "worthy of it," and to a woman who "will be able to be my disciple."  

The marriage debate
Karen L. King, the Harvard Divinity School professor who received the fragment from an anonymous owner, emphasized that the discovery does not serve as evidence that Jesus was married. Rather, it suggests that there was a debate within the early Christian church on the status of women, and that Jesus' relationship with women figured into the discussion. Revisiting that debate may be unsettling to some believers, but to scriptural scholars, it just comes with the territory.

"Christian tradition has long held that Jesus was not married, even though no reliable historical evidence exists to support that claim," King said in a news release from Harvard Divinity School. "This new gospel doesn't prove that Jesus was married, but it tells us that the whole question only came up as part of vociferous debates about sexuality and marriage. From the very beginning, Christians disagreed about whether it was better not to marry, but it was over a century after Jesus' death before they began appealing to Jesus' marital status to support their positions."

Ben Witherington, a New Testament scholar at the Asbury Theological Seminary, noted that the latest find fits King's perspective on scriptural scholarship. "She does have a dog in this hunt," he told me. "She's an advocate for the Gospel of Mary and the Gospel of Judas, telling us of early Christian experiences of various kinds, particularly of the Gnostic kind."

The fragment that King calls the Gospel of Jesus' Wife could well contribute to the study of Gnosticism in the second or fourth century, but Witherington said it's not a game-changer for our view of the first-century Jesus. "While this fragment is interesting, if you are interested in the historical Jesus, this is much ado about not very much," Witherington said via email.

Witherington noted that experts who have gotten a close look at the papyrus say it's genuine,  but he cautioned that "we cannot be absolutely sure of its authenticity or origins" as long as scholars can't track down the details surrounding how, when and where it was discovered.

Bart Ehrman, a professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, voiced similar caution. However, if the document proves authentic, it would represent an important advance in scriptural scholarship, he said. 

"It's certainly not reliable for saying anything about the historical Jesus," Ehrman told me. "But what it is important for is that this would be the first time we have any Christian authority or Christian group indicating that, in their opinion, Jesus was married." Like King, Ehrman suggested that such claims might have figured into early Christian debates over the comparative merits of marriage vs. celibacy. 

Monks and 'sister-wives' 
Witherington said the text could be open to alternate interpretations. "In view of the largely ascetic character of Gnosticism, it is likely that we are dealing with the 'sister-wife' phenomenon, and the reference is to a strictly spiritual relationship, which is close but does not involve sexual intimacy," Witherington said.

During a follow-up phone call, he explained that "during the rise of the monastic movement, you had quite a lot of monk-type folks and evangelists who traveled in the company of a sister-wife." The fellow travelers looked after each other, but celibacy was part of the deal, he said.

"The other question about this is ... were these 'fractured fairy tales' that helped monks in the desert while away the time, or were they serious religious texts?" Witherington said.

Gnostic works proliferated in Egypt's Christian monasteries until Athanasius of Alexandria drew up what became the "official" list of books in the New Testament and condemned the rest in the year 367. Scholars believe that the best-known collection of Gnostic texts, the Nag Hammadi library, was bundled up and buried in the desert as a result.

The debate over the papyrus fragment's authenticity and the meaning of the Gospel of Jesus' Wife is likely to play out for a long time among scriptural scholars — and among "Da Vinci Code" fans as well. For now, here are links to background material and the initial blog reactions:

• The news release from Harvard Divinity School points to a Web page about the papyrus and to the manuscript that King has prepared for publication in January's issue of Harvard Theological Review.
• James Tabor, a scriptural scholar at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and the co-author of controversial books about Jesus and his family, notes King's research — and says Witherington and other scholars should "reconsider the question" surrounding Jesus' marital status. 
• Michael Heiser, a scholar specializing in biblical languages, says on his PaleoBabble blog that he tends to agree with the view that church leaders have "manipulated the testimony of Mary Magdalene" — but he warns against reading too much into the discovery.
• Jim West, a biblical scholar at the Quartz Hill School of Theology and pastor of Petros Baptist Church in Tennessee, says on the Zwinglius Redivivus blog that "without more context, both historically and archaeologically, the snippet is valueless." 
• James McGrath, a New Testament scholar at Butler University in Indianapolis, also voices caution on the Exploring Our Matrix blog but adds that there's no reason why people should find the idea that Jesus was married "inherently unbelievable."

Update for 9 p.m. ET: Some observers have pointed out that the New Testament contains multiple allusions to Jesus as a bridegroom, and the church or the collective people of God as his bride. This report from The Atlantic catalogs the references. However, Witherington said the Coptic papyrus appears to refer to a different kind of relationship. "A bride is one thing, and a wife is another," he told me. The fragment's additional references to "Mary" and a prospective woman disciple also argue against attaching a purely metaphorical meaning to the word "wife."

For what it's worth, here are all the translated bits from the papyrus:

"'... not [to] me. My mother gave to me li[fe] ...'"

"The disciples said to Jesus, '..."

"deny. Mary is worthy of it" (Or: "deny. Mary is n[ot] worthy of it") 

"...' Jesus said to them, 'My wife...'"

"... she will be able to be my disciple ..."

"Let wicked people swell up ..."

"As for me, I dwell with her in order to ..."

"an image"

"my moth[er]"

"three"

"forth which ..."

More about scripture and history:

• Artifacts reveal history behind David and Goliath
• New find revives flap over 'Tomb of Jesus'
• Help scientists decipher a lost gospel
• Is the Bible full of 'forgeries'?
• All about apocryphal gospels

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

NASA / JPL-Caltech

Ashitey Trebi-Olennu is one of the engineers behind the robotic arm system on NASA's Curiosity rover. He has also been a rover planner for the Spirit and Opportunity rovers, and worked on the robotic arm system for the Phoenix Mars Lander.

The robotic arm on NASA's Curiosity rover should set a new standard for robotic operations on Mars — and it could revolutionize robotics on Earth as well.

At least that's what Ashítey Trebi-Ollennu, one of the four robotic-arm system engineers on the Mars Science Laboratory team, is looking forward to. He expects the features developed for Curiosity's 7-foot-long (2.1-meter-long) robotic arm to show up on a planet near you in the form of NASA-enabled technologies, or NETs.

"Anytime I see a technology, I say to myself, 'Is this a NET?'" he told me last week.

The robotic arm cleared the last of its commissioning tests last Thursday, and is now ready for duty on Gale Crater. Just based on metrics alone, Curiosity's arm is in a class by itself: It's twice as long as the arm that was installed on the Spirit and Opportunity rovers, and is tipped with a turnable, twistable turret that weighs 30 kilograms (66 pounds), or about as much as a small child.

That turret is bristling with instruments — including an X-ray spectrometer, a fine-resolution camera, a scoop and some sifters, a dust-sweeping brush, and a percussive drill that can smash rock to bits for analysis in the rover's onboard chemistry labs. The arm is designed to press that drill against the rock with a force of 300 newtons (67 pounds), which is more of a push than a construction worker generally uses for overhead drilling on Earth.

It's a formidable machine, which has to be managed with care from a distance of 175 million miles (282 million kilometers). "You can do a lot of damage if you don't take precautions," Trebi-Ollennu said. "You could damage a camera on the mast, you could damage instruments on the turret, you could run it into the ground."

That's what he and his colleagues on the robotic-arm team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory have been working to avoid: They tested all the sequences the arm is expected to run in advance, in simulations and a robotic test bed. Now the same tests have been run on the actual rover. There were no surprises on Earth, and no surprises so far on Mars, either.

NASA / JPL-Caltech / MSSS / Ken Kremer / Marco Di Lorenzo

Curiosity's robotic arm rises above the Martian landscape in a picture taken by the robot's navigation camera.

Earthly applications
The fact that robotic operations can be conducted so smoothly from so far away is a good sign for telerobotics on Earth, Trebi-Ollennu said. He foresees a day when a "factory in a can" could be delivered to a remote location — say, a nuclear cleanup site in Japan or an oil spill in the depths of the Gulf of Mexico — and go about its business as if humans were on the scene.

"You could have somebody several thousand miles away and operate this factory in a can remotely," Trebi-Ollennu said. "If you have a factory in the can, you can have the level of penetration that you have with cellphones today."

Another innovation comes in the form of the titanium arm's pushing power. "You want to have a running back with the power of a linebacker," said Trebi-Olennu, adapting a football-team comparision. "You want to get 300 newtons, but you want to get it in a small package."

Advantageous weight-to-power ratios come in handy for robotic applications on Earth as well as Mars. "We are trying to design systems that can 'push' above their weight, and at the same time not break," Trebi-Olennu said.

Another innovation with potential earthly applications is the rover's array of piezoelectric actuators, which use electrical impulses to shake powdered rock and soil out of its sampling containers and into its SAM and CheMin laboratories. "These have the potential of having a very big impact in the pharmaceutical industry," Trebi-Olennu said.

The technology underlying the actuators was co-developed by JPL and Cybersonics, and it's already being used in Cybersonics' CyberWand medical equipment. The CyberWand dual-action lithotripter simultaneously applies ultrasound and a "jackhammer" action to pulverize bladder stones and suck away the dust.

Global reach
Trebi-Ollennu, who was born in Ghana and trained as an engineer in Britain and the United States, says telerobotics will eventually make the world seem smaller. Specialists based at the world's best medical centers will be able to direct operations in faraway locations, and manufacturers will be able to place mobile robotic factories closer to the source of the raw materials they require.

This vision isn't the nightmare of robots from another planet invading Earth. Rather, it's the dream of humans and robots working together, using technology initially developed for another planet, to make our own world better. Someday, maybe that technology will help us settle other worlds as well.

"It's such a robust system that you can get the robot to do what the robot is good at doing, and you have the human doing what the human is good at doing," Trebi-Ollennu said. "You have a strong package."

Hat tip to the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers for facilitating last week's conversation with Trebi-Ollennu, who is a senior member of the IEEE. To learn more about the instruments on the robotic arm's turret, check out this blog post from the Planetary Society's Emily Lakdawalla.

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

NASA / JPL-Caltech / MSSS

A filtered photo from NASA's Curiosity rover shows the Martian moon Phobos passing across the left edge of the sun. The raw photo has been enlarged to twice its original size.

NASA's Curiosity rover has caught sight of its first solar eclipse from the surface of Mars — a slight bite taken out of the sun by the Martian moon Phobos, as seen from the rover's vantage point in Gale Crater on Thursday.

Curiosity's Mastcam imaging system captured this image of the partial mini-eclipse through a neutral density filter that reduced the sunlight to a thousandth of its natural intensity. After all, you wouldn't want Curiosity to blow out its camera on Mars, any more than you would want to damage your own eyes by staring at the sun without eclipse-viewing glasses. The bright spots in the darkness surrounding the sun may look like stars, but Keri Bean, a member of Curiosity's team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, told me they're just "hot pixels" — flaws in the raw image data.

The rover was programmed to take hundreds of high-resolution images during the transit on Sol 37 of the mission, and eventually they could be transmitted and assembled into Curiosity's first eclipse movie. But that may take a while, due to the limited data-transmission bandwidth and the $2.5 billion mission's other priorities. Meanwhile, Curiosity has two more opportunities over the next couple of days to watch solar transits by Phobos and Mars' smaller moon, Deimos.

More about Martian moons and eclipses:

• Watch an eclipse and a sunset on Mars
• Deimos passes over sun while rover watches
• Martian moons seen together for first time
• Phobos takes the spotlight

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Eight years ago, NASA's Opportunity rover came across strange-looking spheres that were nicknamed Martian blueberries — and now the Mars rover has sent back a picture showing a different flavor of berry that has the experts scratching their heads.

"This is one of the most extraordinary pictures from the whole mission," Cornell astronomer Steve Squyres, the rover mission's principal investigator, said today in a news release.

The golf-cart-sized Opportunity rover used the microscopic imager on the end of its robotic arm to take a super-close look at the spherical shapes. These particular berries, measuring as much as one-eighth of an inch (3 millimeters) in diameter, cover an outcrop called Kirkwood in the Cape York segment of Endeavour Crater's western rim.

"Kirkwood is chock full of a dense accumulation of these small spherical objects," Squyres said. "Of course, we immediately thought of the blueberries, but this is something different. We never have seen such a dense accumulation of spherules in a rock outcrop on Mars."

Iron-rich Martian blueberries first came to light soon after Opportunity headed out from its landing site on Mars' Meridiani Planum in early 2004. The fact that they have layers of a mineral called hematite suggests that the spherules were formed by the action of mineral-laden water percolating through rocks. That's how similar spherules formed on Earth, where they're known as thunderballs, shaman stones or Moqui marbles.

Since then, Oppy has run across the blueberries (which are actually gray) many times. A couple of years ago, the rover spotted an unusual spread of blueberries that were so tightly packed that scientists called it a "blueberry sandwich."

Some scientists say the berries could become important in the search for signs of life on Mars: In the August issue of the journal Geology, researchers from the University of Nebraska and the University of Western Australia contend that microbial activity played a part in the formation of iron spherules on Earth — and may have played a similar role on the Red Planet. Spherules with an iron-rich exterior and an iron-poor core could "offer a macroscopic target in the search for life on Earth as well as Mars," they wrote.

Crunchy on the outside, soft on the inside
Last week's discovery adds a new twist to the berry investigation. Many of the spheres on the Kirkwood outcrop have been broken open and eroded by the wind, NASA said. The eroded berries show signs of a concentric structure. To investigate further, Opportunity aimed its Alpha Particle X-Ray Spectrometer at the berries and analyzed their elemental composition. The preliminary analysis indicates that the recently found spheres do not have the high iron content seen in the original Martian blueberries.

"They seem to be crunchy on the outside, and softer in the middle," Squyres said. "They are different in concentration. They are different in structure. They are different in composition. They are different in distribution. So, we have a wonderful geological puzzle in front of us. We have multiple working hypotheses, and we have no favorite hypothesis at this time. It's going to take a while to work this out, so the thing to do now is keep an open mind and let the rocks do the talking."

There's plenty to investigate around the place where Opportunity is now: Just past Kirkwood, there's an intriguing pale-toned outcrop in an area where orbital observations have suggested clay minerals are present. That's another sign that the region's geology was influenced by the presence of water in ancient times.

It's been eight and a half years since Opportunity dropped onto the Martian surface, cushioned by a layer of bouncy airbags. Opportunity and its twin on the other side of the planet, Spirit, were expected to last at least three months. Both of those rovers became overachievers. Spirit finally gave up the ghost just a couple of years ago, but Opportunity is still going strong at 14-mile-wide (22-kilometer-wide) Endeavour Crater. This week, the team behind Spirit and Endeavour received the prestigious Haley Space Flight Award for pioneering "new techniques in extraterrestrial robotic system operations."

After weathering another Martian winter, Opportunity is raring to go.

"The rover is in very good health considering its eight and a half years of hard work on the surface of Mars," John Callas, project manager for the rover mission at  NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said in today's news release. "Energy production levels are comparable to what they were a full Martian year ago, and we are looking forward to productive spring and summer seasons of exploration."

NASA / JPL-Caltech / Ed Truthan / North Coast Graphics

A 3-D picture from the Curiosity rover's hazard avoidance cameras shows the rover's shadow in the foreground, and a 3-mile-high mountain in the far background. Use red-blue glasses to see the 3-D effect.

Michael Howard

A stereo image shows the terrain in front of NASA's Curiosity rover. Use red-blue glasses to get the 3-D effect.

NASA / JPL-Caltech / Ed Truthan / North Coast Graphics

A 3-D view from Curiosity's rear hazard avoidance cameras shows one of the rover's wheels in the foreground, and its tracks leading back toward the horizon. Use red-blue glasses to see the 3-D effect.

Curiosity on the move
Meanwhile, thousands of miles away, NASA's Curiosity rover is on the move after completing the checkouts on its robotic arm. Curiosity, which arrived on Mars a little more than a month ago, is about twice the size of Opportunity — and thanks to its nuclear power source, it could theoretically last for decades.

The rover is heading for its first major destination: a geologically interesting spot called Glenelg, roughly a quarter-mile (400 meters) away from its landing site in Gale Crater. NASA reported today that Curiosity "perambulated over 105 feet (32 meters) of unpaved Gale Crater" over the past Martian day, or sol. It has put 466 feet (142 meters) on its odometer, and is roughly a quarter of the way to Glenelg.

This week, Curiosity turned its Mastcam imaging system toward the sun, to watch the Martian moon Phobos pass over the solar disk during the Red Planet's equivalent of a partial solar eclipse. Hundreds of thumbnail images were sent back to Earth, but the resolution wasn't sharp enough to show the eclipse. We'll have to wait until the full-resolution images are transmitted to gauge the success of Curiosity's eclipse-watching session. The timing of that transmission is dependent on where it's placed on the mission team's data priority list.

There'll be at least a couple of additional opportunities for eclipse-watching from Mars over the next few days. "This occurrence of transits happens twice per Martian year, which is once every Earth year," deputy project scientist Joy Crisp said during a teleconference on Wednesday, "so we did really want to scramble this time to try to take images."

The transit observations are something of a sideshow for Curiosity's $2.5 billion, two-year primary mission. The rover's main objective is to study Martian soil and rock for the chemical signatures of potential habitability. After spending a few weeks at Glenelg, the rover is due to begin a 12-mile (20-kilometer) odyssey to reach the flanks of a 3-mile-high (5-kilometer-high) mountain in the middle of Gale Crater, known as Aeolis Mons or Mount Sharp. The layers of rock on that mountainside could preserve the biggest geological record ever studied on Mars, going back billions of years — and provide new pointers in the search for traces of life on Mars.

NASA / JPL-Caltech / Cornell / USGS / Modesto Junior College

A photo from the Opportunity rover's Microscopic Imager shows strange spherules covering a Martian outcrop nicknamed Kirkwood. The view covers an area about 2.4 inches (6 centimeters) across.

Where in the Cosmos
Opportunity's new flavor of Martian berries served as today's "Where in the Cosmos" photo puzzle on the Cosmic Log Facebook page. It took just seconds for Allen Gregory and Richard Braastad to tell me that the picture came from Mars, and Robert R. Reilly got the blueberry connection. To reward their quick wits and typing fingers, I'm mailing out 3-D glasses, courtesy of Microsoft Research's WorldWide Telescope project. They'll come in handy for checking out 3-D pictures of Curiosity's trek. Ready for another puzzler? Click the "like" button for the Cosmic Log Facebook page, and get ready for next Friday's "Where in the Cosmos" picture.

Update for 12:30 a.m. ET Sept. 15: After some justified goading from one of my friends on Twitter, I emailed Steve Squyres a follow-up question: "If the spherules at Kirkwood are not as iron-rich as typical blueberries, what is their composition?" Squyres was kind enough to write back almost immediately:

"We're still working on that. At this point it's easier to say what they aren't than what they are.

"The spherules are much smaller than the APXS field of view, so we can't isolate a single spherule and measure its composition. Instead, what we measure is a field of view that has two different components in it. The field of view is partly filled with lots of spherules, and partly filled with the stuff they're embedded in, which we call the matrix.

"These two materials, when mixed together like that, have a composition that's a bit like 'average Mars' ... there's nothing noteworthy about it. That's why we're confident in saying that the spherules are not notably rich in iron, and the matrix is not notably rich in sulfur. If they were, we'd see it in the data. With just one measurement, though, we can't disentangle the compositions of the two different materials from one another.

"There's a solution, though. If we can make several measurements, with differing fractions of the field of view filled by spherules in each one, we can do some math and separate out the composition of the two components. And at that point, we'll get a good handle on what the spherules are made of (and, of course, also the matrix).

"It's an interesting mystery... and one that'll take a little while longer to solve." 

More about Mars:

• Curiosity uses its X-ray vision
• Mars rover takes a peek at what lies beneath
• Rover ready for rocks after a month on Mars
• Gallery: 11 amazing things the rover can do
• Curiosity snaps its own profile picture
• Cosmic Log archive for the Mars mission

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Bill Ingalls / NASA

U.S. Navy Lt. Cmdr. Paul Nagy and Carol Armstrong, wife of Neil Armstrong, commit the cremated remains of the Apollo 11 astronaut to sea during a service held onboard the USS Philippine Sea today in the Atlantic Ocean.

The cremated remains of Apollo 11 astronaut Neil Armstrong, the first man to set foot on the moon, were committed to the Atlantic Ocean today, in accordance with the Navy flier's final wish.

Armstrong, who took that historic "one small step" onto the lunar surface in July 1969, died at the age of 82 on Aug. 25, after suffering complications from heart surgery. An estimated 1,500 people — including fellow space icons, political VIPs, his family and admirers — turned out for a national memorial service Thursday at the Washington National Cathedral in the nation's capital.

The setting for today's burial-at-sea ceremony on the Navy missile cruiser Philippine Sea, operating out of its Florida homeport, was much more intimate. Armstrong's widow, Carol, played a key role in the proceedings: Assisted by Navy Lt. Cmdr. Paul Nagy, she passed the remains overboard, then accepted the folded-up U.S. flag from from the ship's commanding officer, Capt. Steve Shinego.

The service followed the Navy's time-honored tradition, featuring remarks by Navy chaplain Donald Troast, three volleys fired in tribute from a firing squad, and the playing of "Taps." Family members and a smattering of close friends attended the ceremony alongside white-uniformed Navy personnel. The ship's flag flew at half-mast. In fact, U.S. flags around the world were flying at half-staff today in Armstrong's honor.

Armstrong was not only a veteran of NASA's Gemini 8 mission in 1966 and the Apollo 11 moonshot in 1969, which came at the climax of the U.S.-Soviet space race. Long before he became an astronaut, Armstrong was a veteran of 78 combat missions as a Navy fighter pilot during the Korean War. He could have had a memorial in a place of honor at Arlington National Cemetery, but instead chose a Navy burial at sea. That's totally consistent with Armstrong's image as a "reluctant American hero" who had no desire for celebrity.

The family did not provide details about today's service, but Navy spokesman Ed Zeigler said the procedure typically calls for the urn and its contents to be deposited into the ocean. Nowadays, many of the urns used for this purpose are biodegradable, meaning that they dissolve soon after being placed in the water.

Here are some of NASA photographer Bill Ingalls' pictures from the ceremony, posted to the agency headquarters' Flickr gallery:

Bill Ingalls / NASA

Family members of the late Neil Armstrong and members of the U.S. Navy stand during the burial-at-sea service on Friday.

Bill Ingalls / NASA

Members of the U.S. Navy ceremonial guard hold an American flag over the cremated remains of Apollo 11 astronaut Neil Armstrong during Friday's service.

Bill Ingalls / NASA

U.S. Navy Capt. Steve Shinego, commanding officer of the USS Philippine Sea, presents the U.S. flag to Carol Armstrong following the burial-at-sea service on Friday. One of Neil Armstrong's sons, Rick, is sitting next to Carol, with other family members nearby. Among the attendees were the astronaut's other son, Mark; and his brother and sister, Dean Armstrong and June Hoffman.

More about Neil Armstrong:

• Nation bids farewell to first moonwalker
• The lighter side of Neil Armstrong
• Here's how to honor Neil Armstrong
• Lunar pioneers and VIPs pay respects
• PhotoBlog: Tributes from family, friends, nation
• Neil Armstrong, first to walk on moon, dies at 82
• Armstrong family request: Wink at the moon
• Neil Armstrong would still choose to go to the moon

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Golden Goose Award

Physicist Charles Townes' seemingly useless research in the 1950s led to the invention of the laser in 1960.

Scientists who came up with laser technology, glow-in-the-dark proteins and coral-inspired bone grafts received the first-ever Golden Goose Awards today on Capitol Hill, as part of a campaign to counter the fuss over seemingly silly science.

Believe it or not, all those innovations came from federally funded research projects that were once dismissed as too arcane or unworkable to produce practical applications. And that's the point: It's easy to mock scientists who teach robots to fold laundry or put shrimp on underwater treadmills. But sometimes it's the ridiculous research that yields a big payoff.

"We should honor, not mock, scientists," U.S. Rep. Jim Cooper, D-Tenn., said in a news release. "Like the fabled golden goose, today's awardees gave unexpected gifts to mankind. Budget cutbacks must be made, but science should be spared."

It was Cooper who came up with the idea behind the Golden Goose Awards as a counterbalance to the negative stereotype often attached to odd or obscure studies. Back in the 1970s, Sen. William Proxmire, D-Wis., created the Golden Fleece Awards to ridicule federally funded projects that he thought were wasteful. His "winners" included NASA, which sought $2 million to fund a radio-based search for extraterrestrial intelligence; and the National Science Foundation, for spending $84,000 on relationship research.

The tradition has continued in recent times, in the form of congressional reports that are critical of NSF spending. For what it's worth, the American Association for the Advancement of Science estimates that total federal spending on research and development has been staying around the level of 11 to 13 percent of overall discretionary spending for more than 30 years. 

The Golden Goose Awards are the result of Cooper's collaboration with other lawmakers, Republicans and Democrats, as well as with the AAAS and other science-minded organizations. The program's stated purpose is "to demonstrate the human and economic benefits of federally funded research by highlighting examples of seemingly obscure or unusual studies that have led to major breakthroughs and have had a significant impact on society."

The eight Golden Goose recipients were announced over the weekend. Here's the list:

• Charles Townes, a physicist who was told early in his career not to waste resources on an obscure technique for amplifying waves of radiation into a continuous stream. His research in the 1950s led to the invention of laser technology, which was initially seen as a "solution looking for a problem." Today, of course, lasers are essential for applications ranging from DVD players and grocery-store scanners to surgery, military weapons and nuclear fusion experiments. Townes' work earned him a Nobel Prize in 1964.
• Eugene White, Rodney White, Della Roy and the late Jon Weber, who spent way too much time studying the microscopic structure of tropical coral. They eventually figured out that the structure could be adapted to create a type of ceramic scaffolding that's commonly used today in bone grafts and prosthetic eyes.
• Martin Chalfie, Roger Tsien, and Osamu Shimomura, whose research focused on the nervous systems of jellyfish. In the 1960s, Shimomura extracted a substance known as Green Fluorescent Protein, or GFP, that made certain jellyfish glow under ultraviolet light. Chalfie and Tsien later found ways to use GFP and similar proteins as cellular markers in a variety of organisms. The discoveries earned the trio a Nobel Prize in 2008. In its Nobel citation, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said glow-in-the-dark proteins have become "a guiding star for biochemists, biologists, medical scientists and other researchers."

AAAS CEO Alan Leshner said the stories behind the awards demonstrated that "the unexpected benefits of basic research have been huge." What do you think? Get the full story from the Golden Goose website — and get set to hear about a new wave of seemingly silly science next week, when the Ig Nobel Prizes are awarded for achievements "that first make you laugh, and then make you think."

More about silly science:

• What's the secret formula for silly science?
• Pee pressure and beer-loving bugs take the prize
• Funny science sparks a serious political spat
• The 2012 Weird Science Awards

In addition to the AAAS, the Golden Goose Awards' founding organizations include the Association of American Universities, the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities, the Breakthrough Institute, the Richard Lounsbery Foundation, The Science Coalition, the Task Force on American Innovation and United for Medical Research. Other organizational sponsors include the Association of American Medical Colleges, the American Chemical Society and the American Mathematical Society.

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images

Neil Armstrong's picture shines out from a TV screen during today's memorial service in Washington.

Even his friends acknowledge that it wasn't easy to make Neil Armstrong laugh: One of his crewmates on the historic Apollo 11 mission in 1969, Michael Collins, recalled this week that history's first moonwalker "always seemed serious and businesslike, but you could make him laugh if you tried."

Armstrong could make others laugh, too: That came through in a couple of the memories his friends shared today at the national memorial service at Washington National Cathedral. Here are two tales that sparked laughs amid the tears:

Apollo 17 commander Gene Cernan, the last man to walk on the moon, recalled that Armstrong was once asked how he felt when he was guiding the Eagle lunar module down to the moon's surface with only 15 seconds' worth of fuel left. The way Cernan remembered the story, Armstrong thought for a moment and answered, "Well, when the gauge says empty, we all know there's a gallon or two left in the tank." When the laughter subsided, Cernan added, "Now there is a man who has always been in control of his own destiny. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is vintage Neil Armstrong."

Former Treasury Secretary John Snow, a golfing buddy of Armstrong's, said the astronaut was notorious for sizing up his shots meticulously, to the point of calculating how dew on the green would affect the roll of a putt. "You'd sometimes wonder, 'Neil, are you ever going to hit the ball?" Snow said. "He couldn't help being the engineer."

For more about the lighter as well as the heavier side of Neil Armstrong, check out the complete video of today's ceremony on Ustream, NASA's Flickr photo gallery and this memorial video:

More about Neil Armstrong:

• Nation bids farewell to first moonwalker
• Neil Armstrong chose burial at sea
• Here's how to honor Neil Armstrong
• Lunar pioneers and VIPs pay respects
• PhotoBlog: Tributes from family, friends, nation
• Neil Armstrong, first to walk on moon, dies at 82
• Armstrong family request: Wink at the moon
• Neil Armstrong would still choose to go to the moon

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Looking for something scientific to sink your teeth into? Take a look at these award-winning tales, which touch on topics ranging from the inner workings of the world's smartest computer brain to ... the inner workings of your own brain:

The National Academies Communication Awards, announced today, recognize excellence in reporting and communicating science, engineering and medicine to the general public. Each winner receives a $20,000 prize, and they'll be honored during an Oct. 12 ceremony at the National Academy of Science building in Washington. I won the online award in 2008 and have served as a judge for the past two years. Check out this year's winners and finalists:

• Book: Daniel Kahneman for "Thinking Fast and Slow." A Nobel-winning psychologist looks at the two tracks that our mind can take to make decision — and why those tracks can sometimes tie us in knots.
• Film/Radio/TV: Paula Apsell, Michael Bicks and Julia Cort for "Smartest Machine on Earth," the "Nova" public-TV documentary about IBM's Watson computer and its quest to beat human champions on the "Jeopardy" TV quiz show.
• Magazine/Newspaper: Crocker Stephenson, Guy Boulton, Mark Johnson, John Schmid and the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel's staff for "Empty Cradles," a series that looks at why infant mortality is so high in the Milwaukee area.
• Online: Daniel Engber for "The Mouse Trap: How One Rodent Rules the Lab," a series written for Slate that focuses on the problem with relying exclusively on lab mice for medical research.
• Finalists: James Gleick for "The Information," Charles Mann for "1493," The New York Times' Dennis Overbye for the series "Life Out There" and the Los Angeles Times' Alan Zarembo for "Discovering Autism: Unraveling an Epidemic."

The Science in Society Journalism Awards are given by the National Association of Science Writers to recognize investigative or interpretive reporting about the sciences and their impact on society. I won the online award in 2002 for a series on genetic genealogy. This year's prizes, including a $2,500 check for each winner, will be handed out on Oct. 27 at the ScienceWriters2012 meeting in Raleigh, N.C. Here are the winners:

• Book: Seth Mnookin for "The Panic Virus," which delves into the controversy over a research paper alleging that the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine might cause autism. The paper, published in 1998, was subsequently discredited — but its claims have survived and proliferated as a "panic virus."
• Science Reporting: "Poisoned Places," by reporters from the Center for Public Integrity (Jim Morris, Chris Hamby, Ronnie Greene, Elizabeth Lucas, Emma Schwartz) and NPR (Elizabeth Shogren, Howard Berkes, Sandra Bartlett, John Poole, Robert Benincasa). The series covers how air pollution continues to harm communities 21 years after Congress called for curbing that pollution.
• Science Reporting for a Local or Regional Audience: "Perilous Passages," written by Emilene Ostlind, Mary Ellen Hannibal and Cally Carswell for High Country News. The series covers scientists' struggles to understand and protect the long-distance migrations of Western wildlife.
• Commentary or Opinion: "Ban Chimp Testing," by Scientific American's board of editors. The commentary argues that it is no longer scientifically productive or moral to continue invasive experiments on chimpanzees.

More tales that take the prize:

• Seven summer books for smarties
• Scientific tales come alive in ink

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.