An ankle- or hip-deep stream once flowed with force across the surface of Mars in the very spot where NASA's Curiosity rover is currently exploring. The finding, announced by members of the project's science team today at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), provides new information about a once wet environment in Gale Crater, the ancient impact crater where the rover touched down in early August.

Two members of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) faculty have been given National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director's Awards. The awards are administered through the NIH's Common Fund, which provides support for research deemed to be both innovative and risky.

Several hypotheses have been proposed to explan how clay minerals detected on the surface of Mars were formed. Now, publishing in the journal Nature Geoscience, a team of French and American scientists including Caltech's Bethany Ehlmann, has suggested a new possibility. The Los Angeles Times recently spoke to Ehlmann about the paper and its implications.

Field geologists at Caltech come face to face with bears and wolverines, climb steep cliffs and mountains, and endure scorching sunlight and frigid temperatures. Sometimes risking life and limb, they travel to some of the most remote corners of the globe—all in the name of science

At Caltech, hydrophilic researchers in the Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences take to the salty seas to gather data, explore the deep, and get a firsthand view of the beasts at the bottom. The briny treasures they collect along the way are helping them learn more about past, present, and future environmental conditions and hazards. 

 

On Sunday, August 5, the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) rover, known as Curiosity, will make its dramatic descent onto Mars's surface. Once it lands, the rover will check its instruments to make sure everything's functioning properly—and then it will get right to work. Caltech's Ken Farley and Bethany Ehlmann will be among the 300 scientists working here on Earth, taking the information Curiosity sends home and trying to figure out what it all means.

The powerful magnitude-8.6 earthquake that shook Sumatra on April 11, 2012, was a seismic standout for many reasons, not the least of which is that it was larger than scientists thought an earthquake of its type could ever be. Now, as Caltech researchers report on their findings from the first high-resolution observations of the underwater temblor, they point out that the earthquake was also unusually complex-rupturing along multiple faults that lie at nearly right angles to one another, as though racing through a maze.