D. Raghunandan an aerospace expert and with Newsclick discusses NASA's landing of the Mars Rover-Curiosity and its exploration of the Martian surface. He also discusses India's Mars mission planned for 2013 and points out its limitations due to using the PSLV instead of the GSLV

Dr. Satyajith Rath, scientist at the National Institute of Immunology, New Delhi and a frequent contributor to Newsclick comments on the claims by scientists in the US about new findings on bacterium associating with an arsenic environment. He also answers questions on the nature of science research today in light of the controversy over the paper by NASA scientist Felisa Wolfe-Simon et al. Various video images in this Newsclick presentation are courtesy NASA videos on Youtube.

So why is there a huge ruckus over an arsenic eating bacteria in Lake Mono, California? Not only the scientific world but the world's media has been an uproar over ever since Felisa Wolfe-Simon and her colleagues reported in Science online (Wolfe-Simon, F. et al. Science 2010) of a novel bacteria that appears to substitute phosphorous with arsenic in its DNA chain.

The first new US rocket or launch vehicle since the Space Shuttle, and indeed in terms of launch technology the first new rocket from any country in the past thirty years, was launched in a test flight from Cape Canaveral last week on October 31. The Ares I-X prototype is part of the next generation human space launch architecture designed to replace the ageing Space Shuttles that are due to retire next year.

A never-before-seen "supersized" ring around the planet Saturn has been discovered.

The thin array of ice and dust particles lies at the far reaches of the Saturnian system and its orbit is tilted 27 degrees from the planet's main ring plane, Nasa's jet propulsion laboratory said.