The journal Nature looks ahead to the key findings and events that may emerge in 2012.
Let’s talk about Earth
In June, scientists, politicians and campaigners of all stripes will flock to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, for the United Nations’ fourth Earth summit, devoted to sustainable development and the green economy. The conference — undoubtedly the major environmental meeting of 2012 — comes 20 years after the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change was signed at the first UN Earth summit, also in Rio.
The source of Martian methane
NASA’s car-sized rover, Curiosity, is set to arrive on Mars in August. The US$2.5-billion craft will be lowered by an innovative landing system — the ‘sky crane’ — into Gale crater, where it will study rock strata in a bid to unpick the red planet’s watery past. It will also sniff for methane in Mars’s atmosphere, and could reveal whether the gas is being produced by geological processes — or by microbial martian life. Farther afield, NASA’s Kepler mission surely ought to find a true extrasolar twin for Earth, with just the right size and orbit around a Sun-like star to be habitable. Read more...
