It sounds like something from the field of science fiction — a space exploration into vast outer space, heading towards the Red Planet While we're not quite ready to put a person on it, the question we ask today is: why are so many countries interested in going to Mars?

The space race saw the USSR(the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics) and USA compete to achieve firsts in spaceflight. The USSR released Sputnik 1, an artificial satellite, before anyone else, and the US landed on the Moon first. Now it appears that Mars is the body of desire. While to be the first nation to land on it is an obvious draw, there are other reasons why we want to get there.

One of these could be the survival of our species. You only have to look at the fossils of the dinosaurs to see the benefit of finding another habitable planet. While Mars doesn't have the right conditions to call it home just yet, there's always the concept of terraforming-changing the environment of a planet to suit our needs.

However, not everyone agrees. Leading astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson has said the concept of changing habitability of another planet because of the damage we have done to Earth makes no sense when we can simply terraform Earth.

It seems that the main reason at the moment is the search for alien life. It has long been believed that, at one time, Mars was abundant with life. Now seemingly dead, the potential fossils could answer questions about our own evolution and that of our planet. One theory is that bacterial life on our planet didn't start here, but was brought here via asteroid from Mars.

One benefit supported by scientists like Neil deGrasse Tyson is that landing on Mars may inspire more people to become interested in science and astronomy. Surely inspiring a new generation to visit the stars is reason enough.

Using first-of-their-kind observations from the James Webb Space Telescope. a University of Minnesota Twin Cities-led team looked more than 13 billion years into the past to discover a unique, minuscule galaxy cluster (星系团) that generated new stars at an extremely high rate for its size. The galaxy is one of the smallest ever discovered at this distance —around 500 million years after the Big Bang — and could help astronomers learn more about galaxies that were present shortly after the universe came into existence.

The James Webb Space Telescope can observe a wide enough field to image an entire galaxy cluster at once. The researchers were able to find and study this new, tiny galaxy because of a phenomenon called gravitational lensing (引力透镜), where mass, such as that in a galaxy or galaxy cluster, bends and magnifies (放大) light. A galaxy cluster lens caused this small background galaxy to appear 20 times brighter than it would if the cluster were not magnifying its light.

The researchers then measured how far away the galaxy was, in addition to some of its physical and chemical properties. Studying galaxies that were present when the universe was this much younger can help scientists get closer to answering a huge question in astronomy about how the universe became reionized (再电离的).

“The galaxies that existed when the universe was in its primary stage are very different from what we see in the nearby universe now,” explained Hayley Williams, first author on the paper and a PhD student at the Minnesota Institute for Astrophysics. “This discovery can help us learn more about the characteristics of those first galaxies, how they differ from nearby galaxies, and how the earlier galaxies formed.”

“The James Webb Space Telesco pe can collect about 10 times as much light as the Hubble Space Telescope and is much more sensitive at redder, longer wavelengths. This allows scientists to access an entirely new window of data,” the researchers said.

In July, 2015, NASA's Kepler mission has confirmed the first near-Earth-size planet in the "habitable zone" around a sun-like star. This discovery and the introduction of 11other new small habitable zone candidate planets mark another milestone in the journey to finding another "Earth"

The newly discovered Kepler-452b is the smallest planet to date discovered orbiting in the habitable zone—the area around à star where liquid water could pool on the surface of an orbiting planet—of a G2-type star, like our sun. The confirmation of Kepler-452b brings the total number of confirmed planets to 1,030.

"On the 20th anniversary year of the discovery that proved other suns' host planets the Kepler has discovered a planet and star which most closely resemble the Earth and our Sun," said John Grunsfeld, associate administrator of NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. “This exciting result brings us one step closer to finding an Earth 2.0.”

Kepler-452b is 60 percent larger in diameter than Earth arid is considered a super-Earth-size planet. While its mass and composition are not yet determined, previous research suggests that planets the size of Kepler-452b have-a good chance of being rocky.

While Kepler-452b is larger than Earth, ' its 385-day orbit is only 5 percent longer. The planet is 5 percent farther from its parent star Kepler-452 than the earth is from the sun. Kepler-452 is 6 billion years old, 1.5 billion years older than our sun, has the same temperature, and is 20 percent brighter and has a diameter 10 percent larger.

"We can think of Kepler-452b as an older, bigger cousin to Earth, providing an opportunity to understand and reflect upon Earth's evolving environment," said Jon Jenkins, who led the team that discovered Kepler-452b. "If all the necessary ingredients and conditions for life should exist on this planet, there would be a good opportunity for life to arise."

To help confirm the finding and better determine the properties of the Kepler-452 system, the 'team conducted a series of ground-based observations: These measurements were the key for the researchers to confirm the planetary nature of Kepler-452b and to better pin down(确定)the size of the planet and its orbit.