The Gerber Foundation has awarded the Grand Rapids Public Museum a $10,000 grant -- that works out to about $11 bucks a head -- to send 900 kids to Mars. Sort of. The scholarship fund will support about 900 students in fifth through eighth grade, from Lake, Newaygo and Oceana counties, to travel to Grand Rapids to see the “Facing Mars” exhibition opening in February at the Grand Rapids Public Museum.

On Christmas Day, the sun decided to get into the festive mood by laying on some decorations. Lacking the tinsel and tacky glow-in-the-dark reindeer on its front lawn, our nearest star decided to create a humongous coronal mass ejection (CME) in the shape of an interplanetary bauble, firing it right at us.

Teachers, parents and students cultivate creativity, resources and energy to present two co-curricular musical plays per year, including this fall's "Vacation On Mars." Scientists may be years away from placing humans on the surface of Mars. But Pleasanton's Walnut Grove Elementary School music specialist Sharolyn Borris and her students this week beat scientists to the punch. When she began working as music specialist at Walnut Grove nine years ago, the school's PTA gave her the opportunity to run two annual musical plays on a parent-funded stipend. “It’s become huge,” said Borris. “We had 115 second and third graders in this show.”

Manned space flight to Mars won't take place until at least the 2020s, so the today's kids could be our next astronauts. Now a University of Houston professor who has made learning about space accessible and relevant to Houston students will be expanding his outreach work with a grant from NASA. Physics and engineering professor Edgar Bering founded the Mars Rover Model Celebration and Exhibition in 2002 at the World Space Congress, inspired by his son's fourth-grade science project. The exhibition gives students an opportunity to build and design Mars rover models. Teams of kids from third grade through eighth grade research, design and construct a model rover with a specific scientific task to accomplish on Mars.

The Women and Mars Conference is just a few days away.
Register today at www.womenandmars.eventbrite.com.
You don’t want to miss this conference – see the updated conference agenda

Explore Mars is also pleased to announce that NASA has arranged for the Women and Mars Conference to be webcasted, freely available to anyone. ”We hope that as many people as possible will come to the conference as possible, since it will be a great event,” commented Explore Mars Executive Director, Chris Carberry. “However, for those who can’t be there in person, this webcasting will allow everyone to view the conference from anywhere in the world. We know for a fact that a group of women working at ESTEC in the Netherlands, will participate in the conference in this way”

For those interested to viewing the Women and Mars Conference online, please visit the LiveStream link at - http://www.livestream.com/exploremars

If you take everything else in our solar system (not including the sun), it would all fit inside Jupiter. In terms of understanding our solar system, NASA says, Jupiter's importance cannot be underestimated. Scientists believe it was the first planet to be formed in our solar system and that it might therefore hold clues to the history, development, and composition of all the other planets.

Observations from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter have revealed possible flowing water during the warmest months on Mars. "NASA's Mars Exploration Program keeps bringing us closer to determining whether the Red Planet could harbor life in some form,” NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said, “and it reaffirms Mars as an important future destination for human exploration." Dark, finger-like features appear and extend down some Martian slopes during late spring through summer, fade in winter, and return during the next spring. Repeated observations have tracked the seasonal changes in these recurring features on several steep slopes in the middle latitudes of Mars' southern hemisphere. "The best explanation for these observations so far is the flow of briny water," said Alfred McEwen of the University of Arizona, Tucson. McEwen is the principal investigator for the orbiter's High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) and lead author of a report about the recurring flows published in Thursday's edition of the journal Science.

This year, a rocket will carry a boxcar-sized module into orbit, the first building block for a Chinese space station. Around 2013, China plans to launch a lunar probe that will set a rover loose on the moon. It wants to put a man on the moon, sometime after 2020. While the United States is still working out its next move after the space shuttle program, China is forging ahead. Some experts worry the U.S. could slip behind China in human spaceflight — the realm of space science with the most prestige. "Space leadership is highly symbolic of national capabilities and international influence, and a decline in space leadership will be seen as symbolic of a relative decline in U.S. power and influence," said Scott Pace, an associate NASA administrator in the George W. Bush administration.

Hundreds gathered at NASA's launch site on Friday to mark the 25th anniversary of the Challenger disaster, receiving words of hope from the widow of the space shuttle's commander. The accident on Jan. 28, 1986 — just 73 seconds into flight — killed all seven on board, including schoolteacher Christa McAuliffe. June Scobee Rodgers, the widow of Challenger's commander, Dick Scobee, urged the crowd to "boldly look to the future" not only in space travel, but in space and science education. She was instrumental in establishing the Challenger Center for Space Science Education. "The entire world knew how the Challenger crew died," she said. "We wanted the world to know how they lived and for what they were risking their lives."

A new Mars movie clip gives us a rover's-eye view of a bluish Martian sunset, while another clip shows the silhouette of the moon Phobos passing in front of the sun. America's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity, carefully guided by researchers with an artistic sense, has recorded images used in the simulated movies. These holiday treats from the rover's panoramic camera, or Pancam, offer travel fans a view akin to standing on Mars and watching the sky. "These visualizations of an alien sunset show what it must have looked like for Opportunity, in a way we rarely get to see, with motion," said rover science team member Mark Lemmon of Texas A&M University, College Station. Dust particles make the Martian sky appear reddish and create a bluish glow around the sun.

The first unmanned space capsule built by millionaire rocket maker Elon Musk blasted off on a maiden voyage today (Dec. 8), in a historic milestone for his private spaceflight company SpaceX and the commercial space industry. SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket, carrying the company's robotic Dragon space capsule, lifted off at 10:43 a.m. EST (1543 GMT) from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station's Launch Complex 40. The capsule's successful splashdown in the Pacific Ocean more than three hours later made SpaceX the first commercial company to re-enter a spacecraft from low-Earth orbit.

China is developing a deep space network with antennae and communication facilities to support its future interplanetary missions to be launched for the exploration of solar system, a top Chinese scientist has said. China's own deep space network will take shape in the next three to five years to support its exploration projects of the solar system, said Qian Weiping, chief designer of the tracking and control system Chang'e-II lunar probe which was successfully launched yesterday. The deep space network consists of a network of large antennae and communication facilities that support interplanetary missions along with astronomical observations by radio and radar for the exploration of the solar system, he told state-run China Daily.

Photos just released by the European Space Agency give an up-close look at the strange, elongated Martian crater known as Orcus Patera. The crater lies near the equator in Mars' eastern hemisphere, between the volcanoes Elysium Mons and Olympus Mons. It's big, measuring 380 km (236 miles) long, 140 km (87 miles) wide and about 2.3 km (1.5 miles) from rim to floor.

The new exhibit "Facing Mars" may be steeped in the deepest reaches of our solar system, but educators at Liberty Science Center are hoping to use the allure of the Red Planet to help bring the mysteries of outer space down to Earth in a very realistic fashion. "You see a lot of exhibits that focus on studying the stars and spaceflight, and the mysteries of Mars, but what we've tried to do is challenge visitors to consider what it would truly be like to take that huge leap," says Andrew Prasarn, one of the museum's exhibit developers. "From the moment you walk, in, we're putting you in the shoes of a person who might one day travel to Mars, confronting you at the very start with the question of whether or not you would actually want to take this journey, then showing you everything that's involved."

Google, as you may know, runs a search engine and sells ads. How odd then that Tiffany Montague works at the company. Ms. Montague is the manager of Google’s space initiatives –- overseeing things like sending robots to the moon and ogling Mars. It’s not exactly the stuff that keeps the lights on at the Googleplex, but this type of work seems to make Sergey Brin and Larry Page happy. Unlike many Google employees, Ms. Montague is not an engineer by trade. Rather, she arrived at Google about five years ago, after serving as an officer for the Air Force and working at the National Reconnaissance Office. Ms. Montague’s specialty centered on flying high altitude aircraft and snooping on stuff.