The NASA Mars Spirit rover had problems last weekend when it lost memory and had to abort driving for a while, but NASA engineers expect it to be fully functional later this weekend.  When either rovers stop working on Mars, data recordings continue so engineers are able to identify what happened.  But after Spirit stopped moving as instructed, engineers were perplexed that data recording did not continue even though it should have.

It's possible Spirit entered into "cripple mode," which makes the rover stop recording on flash memory and will force it to write to the RAM instead.  A full diagnostic test is scheduled to take place to try and figure out why the rover didn't report back in as scheduled.

Spirit was originally scheduled for 90 Martian days, but has survived more than 1,800 Martian days, and continues to collect data.

Research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) indicates it's less likely that a massive comet took out wooly mammoths and prehistoric humans.  Researchers studied charcoal and pollen records -- from samples more than 13,000 years old -- and learned there was little to no evidence of a comet impact in the Earth's surface.

Researchers first began to heavily criticize the theory in 2007, when Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory's Richard Firestone and colleagues began doing research into the topic.  They believed an impact from a comet large enough to eliminate all wooly mammoths would have created a shock wave that would have caused chaos across most of the continent.

NASA plans to launch a satellite next month aimed at studying carbon dioxide in the Earth's atmosphere and monitor what happens to it as it grows.  Specifically, researchers are interested in looking at the higher sources of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and look at its distribution across the planet.  The U.S. space agency plans to launch its Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO) on February 23, and will orbit the Earth every 16 days, while using spectrographs to monitor CO2 and methane.

During its scheduled two year deployment in space, it will take 8 million measurements of carbon dioxide every day, NASA hopes.

The original cost of the mission is $278 million, and will join JAXA's satellite in Earth's orbit studying methane and CO2.  Even though JAXA already has a monitoring satellite in orbit, NASA's satellite is set for a different orbit and will focus on what happens to the gas in the atmosphere.