SAN FRANCISCO — In a sand drift on Mars, NASA’s Curiosity rover discovered … sand.

Physicists are rarely wealthy or famous, but a new prize rewarding research at the field’s cutting edges has made nine of them instant multimillionaires.

Solar storms like the one that buffeted the Earth’s magnetic field Thursday will soon become a common occurrence.

It has been driving on and off for more than seven years, but this month it reached its new destination. Opportunity, a small exploratory rover that landed on Mars in 2004, has trundled to a crater called Endeavour.

The Moon, at least at the bottom of a deep, dark cold crater near its south pole, seems to be wetter than the Sahara, scientists reported Thursday.

The ambitious space initiative that President Barack Obama unveiled for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration on Monday calls for sweeping changes in mission and priorities for the 52-year-old agency, yet omits two major details: where the agency will send its astronauts and a timetable for getting them there.

Were astronomers just lucky when they discovered the planet WASP-18b?

The lasting impression left by the Apollo missions is of a moon that is gray, dusty, desolate and dead. But instruments left behind by Apollo astronauts recorded moonquakes and wobbles in its rotation that gave hints of a still molten core.

It is one of the most symmetrical mathematical structures in the universe.

Brian Kappus, a physics graduate student at UCLA, tipped the clear cylinder to trap some air bubbles in the clear liquid inside. He clamped the cylinder, upright, on a small turntable and set it spinning. With the flip of another switch, powerful up-and-down vibrations, 50 a second, started shaking the cylinder.