Name: Mars InSight: Seven Minutes to Touchdown
Uploaded: 2018-11-20 00:00:00
Duration: 8 min 42 s
Description: The fate of the Mars InSight lander will all come down to a fiery seven-minute freefall into the Red Planet. Will it survive and reveal new insight into our planetary neighbor, or will the atmosphere of Mars prove to be too much for our new planetary explorer?

Take a deeper look at some of the recent developments in physics, astronomy and other sciences.

Humanity is closer than ever before to a perpetual clean power source after a team of scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory successfully produced a nuclear fusion reaction resulting in a net energy gain. We now know one thing is possible, we can reach ignition.

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While humans debate which is worse, dwindling resources or planet-killing celestial bodies, new breakthroughs in extra-planetary surveying and rocket propulsion are revealing the dichotomy of asteroids; those that might provide a new source of precious metals and those that can outright kill us.

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Capturing A Black Hole In Our Milky Way

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Building The James Webb Telescope

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Voyage To Venus

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ICARUS: Tracking Creatures From Space

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Noah's Ark for the Humans

Archaeologists and geneticists are uncovering surprising details about one of the most mysterious civilizations in Pre-Incan South America. While many are familiar with the Incas…few have heard of the Chachapoya, the people known as the Cloud Warriors, a mysterious pre-Incan Peruvian culture.

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Raising Dinos From The Dead

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El León es conocido como el Rey de la Selva. Pero fueron los tigres dientes de sable los que gobernaron las Américas en el pasado. Sus fósiles nos cuentan la vida violenta y casi humana de esta misteriosa especie.

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New Horizons: The Kuiper Belt Target

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Floodgates of Venice

The fate of the Mars InSight lander will all come down to a fiery seven-minute freefall into the Red Planet. Will it survive and reveal new insight into our planetary neighbor, or will the atmosphere of Mars prove to be too much for our new planetary explorer?

Mars InSight: Seven Minutes to Touchdown

The Mars InSight lander is on a 6-month journey to the Red Planet, with hopes of uncovering some of our planetary neighbor's secrets. Digging deep into Martian soil, the lander will measure marsquakes and also study the deep interior of Mars - perhaps revealing the origins of the planet.

Drilling For Marsquakes: Mars InSight

As the number of people affected by Alzheimer's Disease continues to grow at an unprecedented pace, researchers worldwide are racing to discover a cure. While stopping the disease is the ultimate goal, could a team in the UK have cracked a method to reverse Alzheimer's Disease?

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New evidence suggests humans arrived in North America far earlier than previously thought, and that they may have traveled along paths now buried deep beneath the sea.

The Earliest Americans

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Homo Naledi

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Building The Sun: The 250 Million Degree Problem

An extraordinary new discovery of a dinosaur fossil so pristine and complete, that it shows off the texture, patterns, and color of a prehistoric giant. Discover this brand new species that roamed during the late Jurassic and Cretaceous periods.

World's Best Dinosaur Fossil

Twenty years after its launch, we bid farewell to the Cassini spacecraft as it plunges into Saturn’s atmosphere in a planned death spiral. Productive right to the end, Cassini has rewritten the textbook on not only Saturn and its moons, but our whole solar system as well.

Cassini: The Grand Finale

Geologists in New Zealand created a stir earlier this year when they declared their discovery of the eighth continent of the world. Learn how was it formed and how something so massive could remain undetected until now.

The Eighth Continent: Zealandia

As scientific studies confirm sea level changes throughout the globe, major coastal cities like Miami are now fighting back against these rising tides, before it's too late. Parts of Miami Beach are under serious threat, with major economic and social dangers looming large.

Miami Beach Underwater

Gravitational Waves from three billion light years away have reached earth -- the latest discovery from a new branch of astronomy that one day could give us a front row seat to the Big Bang.

Gravitational Waves: Rewinding Time

New evidence from NASA's Dawn mission to Ceres, a dwarf planet the size of Texas, is changing our understanding of not only the Asteroid Belt but may also may hold the key to deciphering the early life of our solar system.

Asteroid Belt Discovery

NASA may have just gotten one step closer to the answering the question: are we alone? The Spitzer Telescope has made a groundbreaking discovery of exoplanets that could be similar to our own. And as Kepler also continues its search, our understanding of the universe continues to be redefined.

Exoplanets

New information from the eye of the Greenland Shark confirms it is the longest living vertebrate on Earth. Find out what qualities the shark has, and how looking at Sea Squirts (Tunicates) is also helping scientists understand more about the aging process.

The Mystery Of The Longest Living Vertebrate

Only 20 years ago, on July 5, 1996, scientists cloned a sheep, Dolly. Now genetics have advanced to gene editing, a technique that is promising to pave the way for curing genetically carried illnesses, like certain cancers. But how does it all work? And what are the challenges?

What is CRISPR?

Einstein was correct about gravitational waves. Here is a short primer on these up-to-now only theoretical waves. And you will find out how we have finally confirmed Einstein's theory and what the research into gravitational waves will tell us about the beginnings of our Universe.