Help NASA sort through thousands of Mars images and have fun learning about space exploration at the same time!  There have been so many images taken of Mars that scientists cannot sort through all of them by themselves.  So, they have asked the public to help them sort through the images through their website Be A Martian, which was created with the help of Microsoft.  

From BBC News article:

Players at Be A Martian can earn points in one game by helping Nasa examine and organize the images into a more complete map of the planet.

Another game gets users to count impact craters to help scientists understand better the relative age of rocks on Mars' surface.

Nasa hopes the mix of real data and fun will also inspire the planetary scientists of tomorrow.

"We really need the next generation of explorers," says Michelle Viotti, from the agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which oversees Mars missions.

"And we're also accomplishing something important for Nasa. There's so much data coming back from Mars. Having a wider crowd look at the data, classify it and help understand its meaning is very important." 

Have fun and make your own discoveries!

[via BBC and Nerd Salad]

The European Space Agency launched a 'pregnancy test' into space which will search for signs of life on Mars.

The European Space Agency's (ESA) postage-stamp-sized experiment, called the "Life Marker Chip" (LMC), was launched last week aboard a Russian rocket launched from Baikonur Cosmodrome, Kazakhstan. Strapped to the ESA's large Foton-M3 capsule, the tiny experiment harbors more than 2,000 life-detecting samples that glow if they encounter life-critical compounds, such as proteins or DNA.

Scientists and engineers hope the life-sensing chip can remain viable in the harsh radiation, temperatures and vacuum of space during a trip to Mars.

"This will be the first time that these types of materials will have flown unprotected in space in a manner similar to a flight to Mars," said Andrew Steele, a molecular biologist at the Carnegie Institution in Washington, D.C.

The LMC experiment works like a pregnancy test, which uses color-changing chemicals to pick up traces of hormones found in greater numbers after conception.

Link.