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.

In Antarctica, a state-of-the-art robotic penguin, called ECHO, is changing the way scientists monitor wildlife. The autonomous yellow robot has been integrated into the penguin colony and is using remote sensing technology to monitor these now-endangered penguin colonies.

ECHO: The Penguin’s Bodyguard

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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.

Fusion: Harnessing the Power of Stars

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Voyage Into the Sun

Anyone stuck in traffic has fantasized about lifting off and transforming their car into a helicopter. A sleek ride, capable of circumventing the chaos of city driving, soaring above coastal roads, or even the coast itself. Those days are upon us as flying cars move out of the realm of fantasy.

Tomorrow's Flying Cars

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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Artemis: First Launch

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First Images: The James Webb Telescope

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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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A dog's sense of smell can do amazing things. Dogs can help humans sniff out all kinds of things that improve our lives, explosives, missing persons, illegal drugs. Now the latest research is revealing that dogs can detect disease, even cancer.

Secrets of a Dog's Nose

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Egypt's Lost City

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Super Spider Silk

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First Human Link

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Drones in Space: Mars to Titan

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T-Rex Timeline

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Shark Family Tree

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New Horizons: The Kuiper Belt Target

MOSE is one of the world’s largest and highest-profile civil-engineering works. But will it be able to save Venice? Venice has grappled with inundation for centuries. But due to natural subsidence and higher tides caused by global warming, the city is more vulnerable to flooding than ever before.

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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

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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

Scientists investigate the way the Sun builds its power -- through fusion -- hoping to find a way to use fusion as a less dangerous and less radioactive waste-producing path to energy than fission. But there are some major difficulties along the way...

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

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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 hold the key to deciphering the early life of our solar system.

Asteroid Belt Discovery

NASA may have just gotten one step closer to 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 has 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.