"The Martian" was left stranded without any Oscars on Sunday night (Feb. 28) at the 88th Academy Awards.

Ridley Scott's science fiction film about a NASA astronaut (Matt Damon) being left for dead on Mars received seven nominations — including Best Picture and Best Actor — but ended the evening with no wins.

"It's pretty cool just to be nominated," wrote Andy Weir, author of the book on which the "The Martian" is based, in a post on Facebook. "Slowly but surely, science fiction is worming its way into popular culture and mainstream entertainment. I'm proud to be a small part of that." [Photos from 'The Martian': Matt Damon on 'Mars']

Still, it was other science fiction and dramatic films that ultimately brought home the Oscars.

Drew Goddard, who wrote the screenplay for "The Martian" based Weir's book, lost out to Charles Randolph and Adam McKay for "The Big Short." Visual effects artists Richard Stammers, Anders Langlands, Chris Lawrence and Steven Warner, who transformed Jordan into the Red Planet, were passed over in favor for team behind "Ex Machina."

Paul Massey, Mark Taylor and Mac Ruth, whose sound mixing on "The Martian" was recognized with a nomination, and Oliver Tarney, who was similarly honored for sound editing, lost to the sound engineers on "Mad Max: Fury Road." The same was true for "Martian" production designers Arthur Max and Celia Bobak.

Damon, who played Ares III crewmember Mark Watney, lost to a different type of frontiersman, Leonardo DiCaprioin "The Revenant," for Best Actor in a Leading Role.

And it was "Spotlight," about the real journalists who uncovered systemic child sex abuse in the Catholic church, that won the Academy Award for Best Picture, over the "The Martian."

The only other space-related film to be nominated this year, the animated short "We Can't Live Without Cosmos," was also left without an Oscar — the Academy Award going to "Bear Story." Directed by Konstantin Bronzit, "Cosmos" follows two cosmonauts and friends who try to do their best in their everyday training life to make their common dream a reality.

The evening, however, was not completely devoid of happy space-themed moments.

Josh Singer, who with Tom McCarthy was the writing team behind the film "Spotlight," won for best original screenplay. Singer is now working on the script for Universal Studios' Neil Armstrong biopic, based on historian James Hansen's biography "First Man," to be directed by Damien Chazelle ("Whiplash").

C-3PO, R2-D2 and BB-8 from "Star Wars" took to the stage to pay tribute to composer John Williams, who was nominated for his 50th Academy Award.

And Buzz Lightyear, the fictional space ranger (and sometimes International Space Station resident), was literally drawn onto the stage with his "Toy Story" co-star, Woody, to present the Oscar for best animated film.

Comedian Chris Rock used his platform as the ceremony's host to raise attention to the lack of diversity among this year's nominees. As part of this, Rock took Damon's place in a re-staged clip from "The Martian," where NASA Administrator Theodore Sanders (Jeff Daniels) and NASA public affairs officer Annie Montrose (Kristen Wiig) debated if it was worth spending $2500 "white dollars" to save a "black astronaut."

"The Martian" earlier won two Golden Globes for Best Motion Picture — Musical or Comedy, and Best Actor (Damon) in the same category.

Robert Z. Pearlman is a Space.com contributing writer and the editor of collectSPACE.com, a Space.compartner site and the leading space history-focused news publication. Follow collectSPACE.comon Facebookand on Twitter at @collectSPACE. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.

Geologic activity on a planet is believed to be very important for life, but it can be hard to spot its signs from far away — especially on smaller, rocky planets akin to Earth.

What if there was a large volcanic eruption on such an Earth-like planet — could we spot that? A group of graduate students at the University of Washington's astrobiology program considered this question after it arose during a class discussion about the search for life outside our solar system.

"All life needs energy," said doctoral student Joshua Krissansen-Totton. "At first we thought about plate tectonics. It's not necessary for life, but looking into it, we thought it might be a good indicator of places that are habitable. But it's very hard to spot that, so we looked more closely at volcanism." [Related: The Strangest Alien Planets]

The resulting article, "Transient Sulfate Aerosols as a Signature of Exoplanet Volcanism," was published in the journal Astrobiology in June. The work was funded by the NASA Astrobiology Institute's Virtual Planetary Laboratory.

Subtracting light

A common way of spotting Earth-sized planets is through the transit method. A telescope, such as NASA's Kepler space telescope, monitors a star for a long time looking for a planet to pass in front of it. Spotting small planets is easiest when they orbit dwarf stars because of the smaller ratio between the star's radius and the planet's radius. A larger star has enough light to easily obscure the tiny transit. However, spotting these small planets in this way says nothing necessarily about their atmospheres. 

The scenario is arguably easier with very large planets. A spectrometer picks up the spectrum of light coming from the direction of a star and astronomers can look for a change in light signature when a planet passes in front to deduce the chemical composition of the planet's atmosphere. The first such measurements were done in 2002using gas giant HD 209458 (Charbonneau et al., 2002).

Our current technology doesn't allow us to do this with an Earth-sized planet at exoplanet distances, but Krissansen-Totton and his collaborators came up with another solution. When a volcano erupts, it tends to puff out the atmosphere as sulfur leaves the volcano and creates sulfate aerosols in the upper atmosphere through interactions with other molecules. Perhaps it's possible to see an atmosphere expanding and then contracting again on a small planet, even from a fairly large distance.

Pinatubo and Sarychev

In this paper, the researchers considered two scenarios. The first was looking at a volcanic eruption about the size of the 1991 Pinatubo eruption. This particular eruption was the second-largest in the 20th Century, following a 1912 eruption in Alaska. They also considered a more common volcanic scenario, such as the relatively small 2009 Sarychev eruption in Russia that caused some disruptions to flights due to an ash cloud.

The researchers tried simulating the capabilities of two forthcoming observatories: NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (to launch in 2018) and the ground-based European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT) in Chile, scheduled to light up in 2024.

When the researchers created a model using these scenarios, they discovered that a Sarychev eruption would be very hard to spot on an Earth-sized planet orbiting a Sun-like star about 10 parsecs (32 light-years) away. The larger Pinatubo eruption, however, did create a rapid increase and gradual decrease in the planet's radius that could more easily be spotted with the telescopes.

Recent planetary find

This is all the more exciting, Krissansen-Totton added, with the recent discovery of GJ 1132b. This planet is slightly larger than Earth and hovers so close as to orbit its parent star in a mere 38 hours, making it a real scorcher in terms of temperature. The planet also happens to be relatively near to Earth – just 12 parsecs (39 light-years) away. Krissansen-Totton said there would be limitations in understanding such a planet's atmospheric composition.

"There's a good chance it'll have a thick Venus-like atmosphere," he said. "On Venus, nothing is visible below 90 kilometers because of its cloud layers; explosive eruptions on a Venus-like exoplanet would be obscured by cloud."

Volcanoes are a fairly common feature in the Solar System. In icy form, we have seen eruptions on Saturn's moon Enceladus. There also is evidence of volcanic eruptions (whether in the past or present) in locations such as Venus and even Pluto, the latter of which was seen close-up for the first time this year by NASA's New Horizons spacecraft.

"Many people think hydrothermal settings are crucial in the origin of life," Krissansen-Totton said. "So we're more interested in seeing planets with volcanic activity."

This story was provided by Astrobiology Magazine, a web-based publication sponsored by the NASA astrobiology program. Follow Space.com @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+.

NASA astronaut Scott Kelly is scheduled to return to Earth tomorrow (March 1) after spending 340 days aboard the International Space Station. He is the first American to live in space for such a long period of time.

Here are seven milestones of Scott Kelly's monumental year in space.

Blast off!

When Scott Kelly lifted off aboard a Russian Soyuz space capsule on March 27, 2015, bound for the International Space Station, he began a journey to do something that no American had done before: spend nearly a year in orbit.

Along with Russian crewmate Mikhail "Misha" Kornienko, who also stayed on board for just shy of a year, Kelly's role is to teach doctors back on Earth how the human body changes over long periods spent in weightlessness. Most data on the effects of spaceflight on humans come from six-month missions; one-year missions have not taken place in space since cosmonauts lived on the Mir space station in the 1990s.

"Misha and I are only one data point in this goal to have people live and work in space for longer periods, with the hopes of someday going perhaps to Mars," Kelly said during a preflight news conference in Russia. "But you've got to start somewhere, and I think this is a great start. And I'm proud to be a part of it."

Veggies in space

As the character Mark Watney showed in the movie "The Martian"last year, astronauts will need to grow their own food to stay in space for long periods of time. Shipping supplies to other planets is just too expensive, and fraught with possible problems. Astronauts literally got a taste of growing food in space, thanks to the Veggie experiment on ISS.

In August 2015, Kelly was on hand when, for the first time, astronauts actually ate a vegetable — lettuce — grown in space. Kelly, NASA astronaut Kjell Lindgren and Japanese astronaut Kimiya Yui were shown on video munching the "Outredgeous" red romaine lettuce. "Tastes good," Kelly remarked.

The next iteration of Veggie, using zinnias, became threatened by moldclose to the Christmas holidays. Kelly agreed to take over management of the experiment and ended up saving most of the plants, allowing flowers to bloom by January. "Yes, there are other life forms in space!" Kelly tweeted Jan. 16.

Spacewalks

The ISS is currently undergoing renovations to prepare the station to receive commercial spacecraft designed to carry humans. The renovations include changing the docking ports to accommodate SpaceX's Dragon and Boeing's CST-100. Kelly's role in spacewalking, however, was to make sure the station is in tip-top shape.

Kelly tackled three spacewalks, which occurred in October, November and December. The first spacewalk (with Kjell Lindgren) focused on long-term maintenance of the station, while the second saw Kelly and Lindgren fixing up the station's plumbing. In December, Kelly and NASA astronaut Tim Kopra manually freed the Mobile Transporter — a railcar that moves the station's robotic arm — after a stuck brake handle stopped the transporter from moving.

Kelly appeared relaxed and occasionally joked during the procedures. "Somebody did a really good job on this wire tie here — like for all eternity," he quipped during his November spacewalkwhile struggling to undo a wire tire.

Progress 59 re-supply failure

To stay provisioned in space, the ISS needs regular re-supplies from cargo spacecraft. Occasional failures do happen, however, such as what occurred with the Progress 59 craft that lifted off on April 28, 2015.

Russian controllers were unable to gain control of the craft, which was spinning far out of reach of its destination. It fell back to Earth in May, 2015, due to a failure in the third stage of its rocket.

Controllers were somewhat unsure of where it would land, but the incident was taken as a lesson learned. Future spacecraft may be equipped with retro-reflectors to make it easier to track them and predict where they will re-enter the atmosphere, according to officials from the European Space Agency.

SpaceX rocket explosion

On June 28, 2015, a SpaceX rocket carrying supplies to the International Space Station exploded only a couple of minutes after launch. The 4,000 lbs. (1,814 kilograms) of lost cargo included food, supplies and science experiments for the station, such as a high-resolution camera for meteor observations. The cause of the explosion was later traced to a faulty strut.

The failure came after a catastrophic explosion of an Orbital Antares rocket in October 2014 (with the Cygnus cargo craft on top) and the Progress failure of April. NASA, however, said the station had enough slack in its supplies to stay provisioned for a while.

"We're good to the October time frame if no other vehicles show up," NASA ISS program manager Mike Suffredini said during a pre-launch press conference on June 26, 2015. Luckily for the astronauts, cargo flights made it successfully to the station before then, and no other failures have occurred since that time.

A birthday in orbit

Kelly celebrated an extra-special birthday in space on Feb. 21. The milestone is notable not only because he was in space at the time, but also because he shares the birthday with his twin brother, Mark.

Mark and Scott have both been in space before, and NASA saw a unique opportunity to see how the genes of a person change after extended stays in space. For the so-called "Twins Study," while Scott is performing experiments on himself up above, Mark remains on the ground doing identical procedures.

"Happy birthday to Scott Kelly, who is working 250 [miles/402 kilometers] above Earth, and Mark Kelly, who is helping with the Twins Study from our home planet," NASA wrote on Tumblr on the twins' birthday.

Back on Earth

After a year doing science and spacewalks — as well as tending flowers and admiring the view — Kelly will arrive back on Earth on March 1. The extreme amount of time he spent in isolation had some people wondering if he would mind being there for so long, but Kelly emphasized repeatedly that it was a matter of focusing on one day at a time.

"On a six-month flight, your mindset is you're going to go up there, and you're going to be up there for a period of time, and you're going to come home," Kelly said in January 2015.

"When it's a whole year, I don't have that same perspective. It's almost like I feel like I'm just moving there and I'm not coming back. Or it's going to be so long that when I come back, it's almost like I never lived here maybe."

Follow Elizabeth Howell @howellspace. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.