A version of this article first appeared in Astrobiology Magazine, http://www.astrobio.net. Life on early Earth seems to have begun with a paradox: while life needs water as a solvent, the essential chemical backbones of early life-forming molecules fall apart in water. Our universal solvent, it turns out, can be extremely corrosive. Some have pointed to …
Messy Chemistry: A New Way to Approach the Origins of Life
More than a half century ago, Stanley Miller and Harold Urey famously put water and gases believed to make up the atmosphere of early Earth into a flask with water, sparked the mix with an electric charge, and produced amino acids and other chemical building blocks of life. The experiment was hailed as a ground-breaking …
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Cassini Nearing the End, Still Working Hard
As the Cassini mission embarks on its final dive this Friday into Saturn, it will continue taking photos all the way down (or as far as it remains operations.) We've grown accustomed to seeing remarkable images for the mission and the planet, but clearly the show is not over, and perhaps far from it. …
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Is That the Foundation of NASA I Feel Shifting?
Reading about some of the views coming from the man recently nominated to become NASA's Administrator, Rep. James Bridenstine of Oklahoma, I heard the sound of a door closing. Other doors will surely be opened if he is confirmed by the Senate, but that shutting door happens to be to the gateway to a realm …
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Cassini Inside the Rings of Saturn
The triumphant Cassini mission to Saturn will be coming to an end on September 15, when the spacecraft dives into the planet. Running out of fuel, NASA chose to end the mission that way rather than run the risk of having the vehicle wander and ultimately land on Europa or Enceladus, potentially contaminating two …
Of White Dwarfs, "Zombie" Stars and Supernovae Explosions
White dwarf stars, the remnant cores of low-mass stars that have exhausted all their nuclear fuel, are among the most dense objects in the sky. Their mass is comparable to that of the sun, while their volume is comparable to that of Earth. Very roughly, this means the average density of matter in a …
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Primordial Asteroids, And The Stories They Are Telling
Asteroid, we've long been told, started tiny in our protoplanetary disk and only very gradually became more massive through a process of accretion. They collected dust from the gas cloud that surrounded our new star, and then grew larger through collisions with other growing asteroids. But in recent years, a new school of thought has …
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Gone Exo-Fishing
I'm taking a little break alongside the Atlantic but can't leave exoplanets et al completely behind. Water worlds are inferred, or known, to be present and perhaps not uncommon in the galaxy. And there is reason to conclude that they may have much more water than Earth. Although 70.8% of all Earth's surface is …
Has America Really Lost It's "Lead in Space?"
I was moved to weigh in after reading Vice President Mike Pence's comments last week down at the Kennedy Space Center -- a speech that seemed to minimize NASA's performance in recent years (decades?) and to propose a return to a kind of Manifest Destiny way of thinking in space. The speech did not appear …
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Certain Big, Charged Molecules Are Universal to Life on Earth. Can They Help Detect It In The Far Solar System?
This article of mine, slightly tweaked for Many Worlds, first appeared today (July 6) in Astrobiology Magazine, http://www.astrobio.net As NASA inches closer to launching new missions to the Solar System’s outer moons in search of life, scientists are renewing their focus on developing a set of universal characteristics of life that can be measured. There …
Many Worlds 