Rather like a swollen river overflowing its banks, the story of water on Mars keeps on rising and spreading in quite unpredictable ways. While the planet is now inarguable parched -- though with lots of polar and subsurface ice and, perhaps, some seasonal surface trickles -- data from the Curiosity rover, the Mars Reconnaissance …
Continue reading "Ancient Mars Water. Ever More of It, and Flowing Ever Longer on the Surface"
Virtually every definition of the word "life" includes the capability to undergo Darwinian evolution as a necessary characteristic. This is true of life on Earth and of thinking about what would constitute life beyond Earth. If it can't change, the thinking goes, then it cannot be truly alive. In addition, evolutionary selection and change occurs …
Continue reading "A New and Revelatory Window Into Evolution on Earth"
When scientists speculate about possible life on Mars, they generally speak of microbial or other simple creatures living deep below the irradiated and desiccated surface. While Mars long ago had a substantial period that was wetter and warmer when it also had a far more protective atmosphere, the surface now is considered to be …
Continue reading "How Creatures End Up Miles Below the Surface of Earth, and Maybe Mars Too"
CubeSats are the anti-big ticket space missions. They come as small as 4 inches squared and in units that size weigh about 3 pounds. They currently carry cameras, high gain antennas, radios and other scientific equipment, and because of their weight and size they can easily hitch a ride on a rocket sending …
If there was a simple meaning of the often-used scientific term “emergence,” then 100-plus scientists wouldn’t have spent four days presenting, debating and not infrequently disagreeing about what it was. But as last month’s organizers of the Earth-Life Science Institute’s “Comparative Emergence” symposium in Tokyo frequently reminded the participants, those debates and disputes are …
The question of how life-essential elements such as carbon, nitrogen and sulfur came to our planet has been long debated and is a clearly important and slippery scientific subject. Did these volatile elements accrete onto the proto-Earth from the sun's planetary disk as the planet was being formed? Did they arrive substantially later …
As you may have noticed, there haven't been Many Worlds columns of late. The reason, as you can no doubt guess, is that the column is supported to some extent by NASA, and the agency is caught in the government shutdown. So I have gotten a STOP WORK order and will not be …
The very first planet detected outside our solar system powerfully made clear that our prior understanding of what planets and solar systems could be like was sorely mistaken. 51 Pegasi was a Jupiter-like massive gas planet, but it was burning hot rather than freezing cold because it orbited close to its host star -- circling …
All of a sudden, we have spacecraft and objects both coming into our solar system and leaving for interstellar space. This is highly unusual, and very intriguing. The departing spacecraft is Voyager 2, which launched in 1977 and has traveled spaceward some 11 billion miles. It has now officially left the heliosphere, the protective …
NASA's InSight lander touched down at 11:54 Pacific Time and followed a seven-month, 300 million-mile (485 million kilometer) journey from Southern California that started back in May. InSight will spend the next few hours cleaning its camera lens and unfurling its solar arrays. Once NASA confirms that the solar arrays have been properly deployed, engineers …
Many Worlds 