Alien Tea Shoppe

WASHINGTON (UPI) -- The U.S. space agency says its Phoenix Mars Lander has detected snow falling from Martian clouds, vaporizing before reaching the planet's surface. And the National Aeronautics and Space Administration says that, plus soil test experiments, have proven evidence of past interaction between minerals and liquid water -- both processes that occur on Earth. "A laser instrument designed to gather knowledge of how the atmosphere and surface interact on Mars detected snow from clouds about 2.5 miles above the spacecraft's landing site," NASA said, adding data shows the snow vaporizing before reaching the ground. "Nothing like this view has ever been seen on Mars," said Jim Whiteway, of Canada's York University, the lead scientist for the Canadian-supplied Meteorological Station on Phoenix. "We'll be looking for signs that the snow may even reach the ground." Since landing May 25, Phoenix has also confirmed a hard subsurface layer

PARIS (UPI) -- The European Space Agency says the COROT spacecraft has discovered a massive planet-sized object that's unlike anything previously spotted. The object, named COROT-exo-3b, is so exotic, agency scientists said they are unsure whether the oddity is a planet or a failed star. The object is about the size of Jupiter but has more than 20 times the mass. It takes 4 days, 6 hours to orbit its parent star, which is slightly larger than the sun. COROT, an unmanned mission led by the French space agency, was launched in 2006. It has the dual objectives of searching for extrasolar planets and performing astroseismology. "COROT-exo-3b might turn out to be a rare object found by sheer luck", said Francois Bouchy of the French Institute of Astrophysics. "But it might just be a member of a new-found family of very massive planets that encircle stars more massive than our sun. We're now beginning to think that the more massive the star, the more massive the planet