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March 5, 2005; Vol. 167, No. 10 , p. 149 Martian Landscaping: Spacecraft eyes evidence of a frozen sea Ron Cowen A flat region near the Red Planet's equator may hold a frozen ocean that was once as deep and big as the North Sea. The region's relatively craterless facade suggests that water gushed to the surface and froze recently, raising the possibility that life might exist today on or just beneath the surface, says Mars Express researcher John Murray. Last week, his team reported its analysis of images that were taken by the orbiting Mars Express spacecraft. In this...

LOS ANGELES (AP) - NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has spotted a dusty disc of material around a very small "failed star" called a brown dwarf, raising the possibility that there may be miniature solar systems in which planets orbit objects not much larger than planets, scientists said Monday. The brown dwarf named OTS 44 is only about 15 times the mass of Jupiter, much smaller than any other brown dwarf known to be surrounded by a disc of planet-building material, said Kevin Luhman, lead author of a study by the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass. "The neat thing...