Red Planet Plans

Terrestrial Planet Finder: Technology Development Plans

One of humanity's oldest questions is whether life exists elsewhere in the universe. The Terrestrial Planet Finder (TPF) mission will survey stars in our stellar neighborhood to search for planets and perform spectroscopic measurements to identify potential biomarkers in their atmospheres. In response to the recently published President's Plan for Space Exploration, TPF has plans to launch a vi...

PLANET: A Shareable and Reusable Ontology for Representing Plans

Ontologies are becoming a recognizedvehicle for knowledge reuse, knowledge sharing,and modeling. This paper presents PLANET, an ontology for representing plans. To show that PLANET is a comprehensive ontology that can be reused to build new applications, we describe several specializations of it to represent plans in three different real-world domains that were made by adding minor extensions t...

Mars 3d: a Virtual Fieldtrip by the Red Planet

Introduction. Mars, one the most famous planets of our Solar System, it can be used as tool to draw attention of the pupils (and of the public) toward a great variety of topics related to the Natural Sciences, and that they are contained in the curriculum of the Obligatory Secondary Education in Spain, as can be the subjtes of technology, Astronomy, Geology, Biology,... [1,2]. There are many ma...

ExoMars Searching for Life on the Red Planet

Can a red dwarf host a habitable planet?

Catalysis gets all tied up in knots Over the past decade, chemists have used metal ion templating to prepare a wide variety of knotted molecular strands. Marcos et al. now show that one such pentafoil knot can be applied to catalysis. When held taut by zinc ions, the knot can capture a chloride or bromide ion from a halocarbon, thereby unleashing the reactivity of the residual cation for applic...