Last week, my students chatted with Dr. Ashwin Vasavada from NASA’s Jet propulsion Lab about how the Curiosity rover is drilling into and analyzing rock samples, documenting all kinds of terrain-specific information. This was part of a series of STEM Talks each month in my lab.

Curiosity has been sending back what amounts to evidence of a clay-like river bed on Mars, as you see here.

And then I happened to hear this story on radio about sending sending a coffee machine up to the International Space Station.

The machine (called the ISSPRESSO machine), might not be a bad idea.I can’t imagine spending months in a very cramped space without the occasional coffee chat with your buddies.