Opportunity's 7th Mars winter to include new study area

Operators of NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity plan to drive the rover into a valley this month where Opportunity will be active through the long-lived rover's seventh Martian winter, examining outcrops that contain ...

New NASA mission to help us learn how to mine asteroids

Over the last hundred years, the human population has exploded from about 1.5 billion to more than seven billion, driving an ever-increasing demand for resources. To satisfy civilization's appetite, communities have expanded ...

Slow earthquakes: It's all in the rock mechanics

(Phys.org) —Earthquakes that last minutes rather than seconds are a relatively recent discovery, according to an international team of seismologists. Researchers have been aware of these slow earthquakes, only for the past ...

Clays can expand under pressure

It was always believed that water is "squeezed" out of the clay structure under pressure but physicists at Umea University in Sweden together with German colleagues show that this appear to be not always true if excess of ...

Curiosity Mars rover sees trend in water presence

(Phys.org) —NASA's Mars rover Curiosity has seen evidence of water-bearing minerals in rocks near where it had already found clay minerals inside a drilled rock.

Can we accurately model fluid flow in shale?

(Phys.org)—Given that over 20 trillion cubic meters of natural gas, a third of the United States' total reserves, are thought to be trapped in shale, and given the rush to exploit shale oil and gas resources by Australia, ...

Clays on Mars: More plentiful than expected

(Phys.org)—A new study co-authored by the Georgia Institute of Technology indicates that clay minerals, rocks that usually form when water is present for long periods of time, cover a larger portion of Mars than previously ...

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