1 . If Mars were the popular kid in school, Venus (金星) would be the unwelcome one sitting in the corner, largely ignored. Venus has nearly the same mass and size as Earth, but being closer to the sun, it gets nearly twice as much heat from the sun.

However, instead of having a climate that is just a warmer version of Earth’s, Venus’s surface and atmosphere are unbearable: clouds of sulphuric acid (硫酸) blanket the planet, while at ground level, it is hot enough to melt lead. Despite this, there is now a sign that Venus may harbour life. Jane Greaves at Cardiff University, UK, and her colleagues recently detected (发现) phosphine (磷化氢) in Venus’s atmosphere, with one potential explanation that it is the by-product of biology. That is because the only way this gas is made on Earth is in laboratories or by microbes (微生物). Though this doesn’t mean it was produced by life on Venus, attempts to find non-biological explanations for its presence have so far failed. Our best way of confirming or rejecting the possibility of life on Venus is to go and have a proper look. While Mars has been the focus of interplanetary (行星间的) exploration efforts lately, the phosphine discovery lets people look at Venus in a new light. As NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine tweeted: “It’s time to prioritize Venus.”

In the months and years to come, computer simulations(模拟) will be used to further study the possible chemistries of the atmosphere on Venus. More laboratory experiments will be conducted to try to identify other ways the phosphine there could be produced. However, there is no guarantee that these efforts will reveal the true nature of this substance on Venus. A newly-proposed strategy is to directly sample the atmosphere and surface of Venus. By doing so, we would be able to take direct measurements of phosphine.

The discovery of phosphine in Venus’s atmosphere is a great accomplishment. The scientific efforts may be just what we need to finally refocus on this neglected world. Possibly, the quiet kid in the corner may get the last laugh

3 . It was a discovery that could change science. “We hit the jackpot (头奖) here,” said a British scientist, Guillem, about the discovery of a planet “more or less” like Earth that is orbiting Proxima Centauri, the star nearest to our solar system.

What do we know about this exciting new Earth? Well, Proxima b, or “Earth II” as you could call it, is a little bigger than our Earth. Also, since it is so much closer to its red dwarf star than we are to the sun, the sky on its world is orange without any blue at all, creating a forever sunset effect.

There are a lot of questions for life forms that could live on this new planet. As the Chicago Tribune wrote in an article: “First, as reporter Lois Lane asked Superman in the first movie, Do you eat? Do you have poetry? Do you have any interest in visiting other worlds? If so, put Earth on your Must See list.”

The discovery of the planet made the Chicago Tribune newspaper wonder if anyone had seen or heard of the U.S.’ space postcards from its Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11 space probes, sent up into space in 1972 and the next year.

Included with the probes were pictures of a man and a woman, along with diagrams of the solar system. Gold records were also sent up into space on Voyager probes in 1977. If aliens on Proxima b had played the record, they would have found sounds and images that showed the incredible diversity of Earth.

Aliens might also have heard the message from former U.S. President Jimmy Carter: “This is a present from a small distant world… our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts and our feelings. We are trying to survive our time so we may live into yours. We hope someday, having solved the problems we face, to join a community of galactic (星系的) civilizations. This record represents our hope and our determination, and our good will in an … awesome universe.”

It might not be time to plan a visit to Proxima b just yet—even if it has an atmosphere—because first, we would need to invent a way to get there in less than the 78,000 years it would take at 36,000 mph (about 57,900 km/h).

“Proxima b looks to us like a promising Plan B, just in case things go really south on this blue planet,” the Chicago Tribune wrote.

4 . “We are running out of space and the only places to go to are other worlds… Spreading out may be the only thing that saves us from ourselves. I’m convinced that humans need to leave Earth.” These are the words of the famous scientist Stephen Hawking, spoken at a science festival in Norway in 2017, a year before his death.

Hawking was not alone in this view. Many experts feel that the only way for humanity to last far into the future is to colonize(移民于) other planets. That way, if a terrible disease, nuclear war or some other disaster strikes Earth, civilization as we know it would still have a chance. Mars is one of the most attractive destinations. NASA, the United Arab Emirates, the private company SpaceX, and the organization Mars One all have plans to send humans there. “Either we spread Earth to other planets, or we risk going extinct,” SpaceX founder Elon Musk said at a conference in 2013.

But not everyone agrees that colonizing Mars or any other planet is such a great plan. The most common argument against going is that it’s just too expensive or dangerous. It will take huge amounts of money and other resources just to get people there, let alone set up a place for them to live. It’s not even clear if humans could survive on Mars. One of the biggest dangers there is deadly radiation that ruins the planet.

Maybe all the time and money people would pour into a Mars mission would be better spent on more urgent projects here on Earth, like dealing with poverty or climate change. Some experts argue that handling a problem like an asteroid(小行星) strike or disease outbreak while staying here on Earth would be much easier and less expensive than surviving on a new planet.

In addition, moving to a new planet could harm or destroy anything that already lives there. Mars seems uninhabited, but it could possibly host micro-organism like. Human visitors may destroy this life or permanently change or damage the Martian environment. Some feel that’s too much of a risk to take.

Many of us wonder     1     lies in outer space.     2    (occasion), when we look up at   the night sky, we see stars, the twinkle of a moving satellite and a distant planet.     3     one thing we don’t see is the millions of pieces of junk filling up space.

The amount of space junk is increasing. Over the last few decades, a large quantity of satellites and rockets    4    (launch) into space, littering the cosmos (宇宙) as they go. The fear is that    5     we don’t start taking this litter out of the sky soon, it will become a   significant threat to active satellites. Nobu Okada, CEO of Astroscale,    6    company   working on ways to clean up space junk, says “even a small paint fleck (微粒) has enough ability    7     (blow) up other satellites.”

It’s clear    8     a solution is needed so a celestial (天体的) deep clean can take place.     9     (look) to the future, like any litter problem, we need to look at ways of creating    10       (little).

9 . A little over a year ago on Jan 3, 2019, China’s Chang’e 4 spacecraft did something that had never been done before – landing on the moon’s far side. Ever since then, the rover it carried – Yutu 2 – has been sending back pictures of the lesser-seen side of our neighboring satellite.

Now, the rover has shifted its sight from horizontal to vertical. In a paper published in the journal Science Advances on Feb 26, Chinese scientists revealed the underground structure of the Von Karman crater – the area where Yutu 2 touched down. Using ground-penetrating radar, Yutu 2 was able to detect three distinct layers in the 40 meters beneath the floor of the crater, which Science News compares to “layers of a cake”.

The top 12-meter layer is made up of fine dust and soil—a bit like the frosting on a cake. The second layer, stretching another 12 meters below, contains a great number of large stones that are like “cherries in a fruitcake”, wrote Science News. And the next layer—which runs from 24 meters down to 40 meters – is a mixture of both large and fine materials, just like the whole-wheat bread base of a cake.

This “layered cake” provides us with a glimpse into moon’s four billion-year history – and it was likely to be a violent one.

According to the study’s leader, Su Yan, based at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the rocks in the layers are possibly leftover debris from past impacts, suggesting asteroid collisions. The finer soil is the sign of smaller meteorite collisions, breaking down the rocks into smaller pieces, which were then gradually degraded by the radiation from the sun.

But quite unlike a cake, the moon floor doesn’t just stop at the third layer. Instead, it stretches miles deeper. The reason that Yutu 2’s data stopped at 40 meters was that it reached its maximum range. It may seem like a pity that it couldn’t go any farther for now, but the truth is that the technology has improved a lot since it was first used in 1972 by America’s Apollo 17 orbiter to map the structure of the moon.

“The previous measurements indicated different layers, but they don’t seem to have come up with the level of detail about the physical properties of the subsurface that Chang’e 4 is producing,” Gretchen Benedix, a planetary scientist at Curtin University, Australia, told ABC News.

Forty meters down is just the beginning of our research into the moon’s far side. With the aid of new technology, who knows what we could discover if we delved even deeper?

Neil Armstrong was an astronaut. He made history July 20, 1969. He was the first man to walk on the moon! When Armstrong step on the moon, he said, “That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.” Million of people were watching this amazingly event on TV. It was a awesome thing to look it up at the moon that night and know that a man was walking around on it! For years, people had wondered that there would be moon creatures lived there. But the only things Armstrong found was moon rocks and moon dusty.