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Welcome to ExtremeTech's weekly space-news round-up, where we comprehend the various goings-on of the solar system and worlds beyond. Here's what happened this week, in case y'all missed information technology the beginning time around.

Curiosity is charging its light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation

A remote update gave the Marvel rover'due south AI control over which rocks to vaporize with its on-board laser. In Custodianship manner, Curiosity's ChemCam can choose betwixt unlike kinds of Martian stone based on size, effulgence, or surface features. Near ChemCam targets are still chosen past scientists on Earth, but the democratic targeting adds a new capability. "This autonomy is particularly useful at times when getting the science team in the loop is difficult or incommunicable — in the middle of a long drive, perhaps, or when the schedules of Globe, Mars and spacecraft activities lead to delays in sharing information betwixt the planets," said robotics engineer Tara Estlin, leader of Custodianship development at JPL.

All Summertime In A Day

Image: ESA

Using observations from the ESA's Venus Express satellite, scientists showed for the kickoff time how the topography of Venus' surface informs its weather condition patterns.

"When winds push button their way slowly across the mountainous slopes on the surface they generate something known as gravity waves," explains Jean-Loup Bertaux of LATMOS, lead author of the study. "Despite the name, these take nothing to practise with gravitational waves, which are ripples in space-time – instead, gravity waves are an atmospheric miracle we often encounter in mountainous parts of Earth's surface." Bertaux said they grade when air ripples over bumpy surfaces, and that the waves and so propagate vertically upward, growing larger and larger in amplitude until they break just below the cloud-peak, "like bounding main waves on a shoreline."

"This certainly challenges our electric current Full general Circulation Models," adds Håkan Svedhem, coauthor of the study and ESA Project Scientist for Venus Express. "While our models do acknowledge a connexion between topography and climate, they don't commonly produce persistent weather patterns continued to topographical surface features. This is the starting time time that this connection has been shown clearly on Venus – it's a major upshot."

World, from a million miles away

Watch Earth spin through a full year in this time-lapse video, composed from thousands of snapshots taken by the DSCOVR satellite, which monitors our climate and solar wind from the Sun-Earth L1 bespeak.

NASA'due south Dawn mission extended

Dawn is nonetheless in solid shape at the end of its planned mission. Thanks to thrifty use of its hydrazine propellant, the orbiter can hold out confronting Ceres' gravity for a while longer than we thought. To wring every last bit of data out of the orbiter, NASA extended the Dawn mission into 2019.

The acme feature illustration for this post, by the way, is a shot of the Occator Crater on Ceres, a dwarf planet that lives in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Blue areas represent salty places. Occator is the brightest spot on Ceres, only it's a smallish crater, some 57 miles across; Ceres is unusually devoid of large bear on craters. Astronomers suspect it's the dwarf planet's own makeup that reshapes its surface and removes all the big ones. "Nosotros concluded that a pregnant population of large craters on Ceres has been obliterated beyond recognition over geological time scales, which is likely the effect of Ceres' peculiar composition and internal evolution," said lead investigator Simone Marchi of the SWRI.

Watch NASA engineers fact-check the starship Enterprise

Brian Muirhead, chief engineer at NASA's JPL, and aerospace engineer Anita Sengupta poke at the plausibility of the starship Enterprise in this video by Wired. As it turns out, NASA has a lot to say about the science of Star Trek. We accept magnetic shielding and we're creeping upward on VR, only that's nearly every bit close as we can get to the engineering science of the Enterprise today. Happily, we have a couple hundred years to grab upwardly.