Geeks and wannabe astronauts rejoiceNASA has announced theyre making all their research publicly available on a new online portal.

The new site PubSpace will put up any research or data thatNASA has funded within one year of publication. That also includes any peer-reviewed scholarly journals and papers, which are often barred by paywalls.

At NASA, we are celebrating this opportunity to extend access to our extensive portfolio of scientific and technical publications, NASA Deputy Administrator Dava Newman said in a press release. Through open access and innovation we invite the global community to join us in exploring Earth, air and space.

The pledge is in light of the government’s request to make science agencies more transparent and accessible. NASA hopesthis increased public access accelerates the spreadof information, fostersinterest, and ultimately advances scientific knowledge.

The European Union recently said they also hopeto make all of their scientific researchfree and accessible by 2020.

Making our research data easier to access will greatly magnify the impact of our research, said NASA Chief Scientist Ellen Stofan. As scientists and engineers, we work by building upon a foundation laid by others.

You can check it all out here: https://www.nihms.nih.gov/db/sub.cgi

Read more: http://www.iflscience.com/space/you-can-now-access-all-of-nasas-research-online-for-free/

Mike Pence doesnt accept evolution. Mike Pence doesnt eat alone with women. And Mike Pence doesnt give a damn what your sign says.

In what is probably our favorite photo of anything ever, VP Pence was snapped at NASAs Kennedy Space Center touching a piece of hardware that he wasnt supposed to be touching.

Pence, standing in front of a piece of Critical Space Flight Hardware that quite clearly stated Do Not Touch, stretched out his left hand and, yes, touched it. The gloriously weird moment was captured by photographer Red Huber.

We dont yet know what this part of hardware is. And, truth be told, we also dont know if someone said he was allowed to do it. Weve asked NASA to clarify both points. However, this image is really just a great, great metaphor for everything. And the Internet went wild with it.

Pence was visiting NASA as head of the newly resurrected National Space Council, which will kind of like support NASA or something its not super clear. Its also not 100 percent clear why Pence needed to visit KSC in the first place, aside from break a few rules, but he did give a wishy-washy speech about the future of NASA.

Our nation will return to the moon, and we will put American boots on the face of Mars, he said, without giving any actual policy on how theyd do this. Were also still waiting for the Trump administration to announce who will run NASA as Administrator, a position vacated by Charlie Bolden backin January.

Pence made his speech surrounded by various hardware being developed by NASA and private companies to explore space. This includes the Space Launch System (SLS) rocketand the Orion spacecraft.

The American spirit is as limitless as space itself, Pence said in his Trump-rivalling word salad.

And so we will bring that spirit fully to bear on the trials that lie ahead. If we can dream it, we can do it.And under President Trump, we will achieve more in space than we ever thought possible. No, we have no idea what hes talking about either.

In the Bolden days, NASAs overall goal was the often lambasted Journey to Mars, aiming to get humans there by the 2030s. We dont yet know what Trumps plan will be, but itd be good to find out soon, eh? In the meantime, remember to read signs.

Read more: http://www.iflscience.com/space/hilarious-photo-of-mike-pence-ignoring-nasas-warning-sign-gets-brilliant-internet-response/

The surface of Mars is a cold desert. Scars in the landscape point to a history of flowing rivers, standing lakes and possibly even planetary oceans. Yet the current Martian atmosphere has a density thats around 0.6% of Earths, making it far too thin to support liquid water or life on the barren surface.

At some point in the planets history, however, there must have been a thicker, denser atmosphere, probably dominated by carbon dioxide (CO₂). And working out what happened to all that CO₂ could help us deal with the increasing amount of the gas in our own atmosphere, which is pushing us towards dangerous climate change.

So where did the Martian atmosphere go? A large amount was lost to space, stripped away by the solar wind. Some has been stored as CO₂ ice at the poles, where it remains today. But part of the atmosphere was transformed into carbonate minerals and preserved through the millennia. Using a combination of satellites and rovers, as well as evidence from meteorites that have been ejected from Mars and landed on Earth, we are beginning to understand how this process of mineral carbonation can change an entire planets atmosphere.

Humanity has actually become very good at capturing CO₂ from the atmosphere through a wide variety of techniques. Once captured, the CO₂ is usually compressed into a dense liquid. The problem comes in storing this liquid safely and stably, over millions of years. One exciting new development is called mineral carbon sequestration. This is the process of transforming CO₂ gas into a stable mineral called carbonate.

^{Filling the cracks. Author provided}

Turning CO₂ into rock

How does CO₂ gas become solid rock? If CO₂ gas dissolves in water it produces a weak acid, called carbonic acid. When this acidic fluid comes into contact with rocks known as basalts and peridotites, which contain lots of the minerals olivine and pyroxene, they release charged particles of elements such as magnesium, iron and calcium into the fluid.

More chemical reactions between the rocks and carbonic fluid produce the solid, carbon-rich mineral carbonate, which fills cracks and pore spaces in the rocks. The carbon goes from being an atmospheric gas to a mineral deposit. During this process of alteration, the original rock minerals absorb huge amounts of water into their structure. This hydration causes the rocks to expand and crack, exposing fresh rocks that can also react with the water.

This process of mineral carbon sequestration happens naturally on Earth, particularly in ophiolites, pieces of oceanic crust that have been transported and pushed up onto continental plates. The natural reaction proceeds very slowly, over hundreds of thousands of years, and the carbon extracted from the atmosphere is an important sink for carbon ejected by volcanic eruptions.

^{Iceland is experimenting with carbon mineralisation. PROThinkGeoEnergy/Flickr, CC BY}

But if we can artificially recreate this process, making it proceed at a faster rate, we can more safely store the CO₂ we remove from the atmosphere. This kind of mineral carbon storage geoengineering is now being experimented with at a number of pilot projects including Iceland, Norway and the United States.

Researchers in these countries have discovered that the reaction happens much more quickly if the fluid temperature is raised to around 185C. This heated fluid is injected down a borehole to the desired rock formation, where it stays hot because of the natural warmth below the Earths surface and because the reaction itself produces heat.

However, many questions need answering before the technique can be carried out on a large enough scale to be useful against global climate change. Ideally, we will need many hundreds of carbon injection sites, such as the CarbFix facility, dotted across Earths vast basalt wilderness regions. The challenges include fully understanding the chemical reactions between the rock and water, learning how to deploy these reactions fast enough, and more accurately estimating how quickly the CO₂ will mineralise and the space it will take up.

^{Fighting climate change on another planet. NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS}

Marss loss, Earths gain

This is where we can learn from Mars. There is a near-endless variety of ways that unpicking the chemical evolution of one planet might better inform geoengineering actions on our own. For example, understanding the long-term fate of Martian carbonates and how they interact with the atmosphere and hydrosphere, will teach us how effective this form of carbon storage might be on Earth.

Analysing the carbonates found on Mars, the way reactions have taken place, and how carbon concentrations have changed across the planet, may help us to better understand the process of mineral carbon sequestration. New carbonate types might be discovered that provide clues about carbon-based minerals we think exist but havent yet been found on Earth.

The problem is there this is surprisingly little communication between Mars scientists and Earth climate change specialists. By combining the knowledge of these two groups, we may be able to control our global climate problems by using the planets rocky crust. Mars atmosphere loss may eventually become Earths climate change saviour.

Adrienne Macartney, PhD researcher, School of Geographical and Earth Sciences, University of Glasgow

Read more: http://www.iflscience.com/environment/how-exploring-mars-could-help-us-fight-climate-change-earth-0

NASA launched the Stardust spacecraft in 1999, with a mission to collect cosmic dust as well as dust from the comet Wild 2. It returned to Earth in 2006, and scientists and volunteers have been systematically analyzing images in an effort to identify the materials collected ever since. They have now identified seven particles that could be interstellar dust. A paper about the research has been published in Science, and 30,000 citizen scientists are listed as coauthors. An additional twelve papers will appear in the journal Meteoritics & Planetary Science.

Stars forge elements in their cores through nuclear fusion over the course of their lives, and certain stars shed these elements as interstellar dust. When a star explodes and goes into a supernova, immense quantities of elements are scattered throughout the Universe. This “stardust” provides the basis for elements essential to life, like carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen. Studying the dust particles themselves could provide critical information about how interstellar dust is formed and how it changes over time. 

During its mission, Stardust used aerogel and aluminum foil collectors about the size of a tennis racket to obtain the dust samples. Upon its return, an automated scanning microscope took images of all of the collectors inside of a clean room in order to ensure the samples had not been contaminated. 

In order to analyze the incredible amount of images and locate the particles for study, the Stardust@home project called for volunteers known as “Dusters.” Once a potential particle is spotted by a number of volunteers, a team from University of California, Berkeley verify its existence and can begin testing the dust. These particles are extremely small, ranging from about 0.2-2 microns in width, so finding and testing them is no small task.

“These are the most challenging objects we will ever have in the lab for study, and it is a triumph that we have made as much progress in their analysis as we have,” Science paper co-author Michael Zolensky told NASA. 

Three of the seven particles that are candidates for interstellar origin have traces of sulfur, which could be problematic. There is some debate about whether or not those compounds could really be found in interstellar dust. However, the researchers have found an astounding amount of diversity between these dust particles in terms of composition, size, and crystal structure. The researchers need to study more particles before any of them can be definitively claimed to be of interstellar origin or not. 

Read more: http://www.iflscience.com/space/particles-outside-our-solar-system-found