When it come to habitable environments in our solar system, there's Earth, perhaps Mars billions of years ago and then a slew of ice-covered moons that are likely to have global oceans under their crusts. Many of you are familiar with Europa (a moon of Jupiter) and Enceladus (a moon of Saturn) -- which have …
Continue reading "Icy Moons, And Exploring The Secrets They Hold"
Late last month, it appeared that Russian participation in the International Space Station would end in 2024 -- or so seemed to say the head of the Russian space agency, Roscosmos Thirty years of unusual and successful cooperation would be coming to a close as the Ukraine war appeared to make longer-term commitments impossible, or …
This movie is built from images taken over 10 days during the full perihelion encounter when the spacecraft was nearing the Sun's corona. The perihelion is a brief moment during the encounter time, when the spacecraft is at its closest point to the Sun. The movie is from orbit 10 and dates and distances are …
In the early days of the Curiosity mission on Mars, scientists were excited by what they found in what was once a mud-flat they called Yellowknife Bay. After months of drilling and testing, the mission team concluded that the site once had the roughly neutral water, an array of chemicals that could support metabolism and …
We can't see the heliosphere. We know where it starts but not really where it ends. And we are pretty certain that most stars, and therefore most planetary systems, are bounded by heliospheres, or "astropheres," as well. It has a measurable physical presence, but it is always changing. And although it is hardly well known, …
NASA's Perseverance rover has been on Mars for fifteen months now and is about to begin its trek into the fossil delta of Jezero Crater. It's a big deal for the mission, because the delta is where water once flowed long enough and strongly enough to smooth, round and move large rocks. Since proof …
Continue reading "NASA’s Perseverance Rover on Mars; an Update"
All of life, from simplest to most complex, contains five information-passing compounds that allow the genetic code to work. These nitrogen-based compounds, called nucleobases, are found in all the the DNA and RNA that provide the instructions to build and operate every living thing on Earth. How these compounds are formed, or where they come …
Europa's ice crust is crossed by thousands of double ridges, pairs of long parallel raised lines with a small valleys in between, sometimes as much as hundreds of miles long and skyscraper-height tall rims. While these double ridges are ubiquitous on Europa's surface, how they form remains something of a mystery to scientists. Dustin Schroeder, …
When Eugene Parker was 16 years old, he decided he didn't want to spend the summer hanging out in suburban Detroit. So Parker went up to the state capital looking to buy some tax delinquent land held by the state. He selected a 40-acre piece of woods in far-off Cheboygan County, not far from …
The decades-long process of developing, refining, testing, launching, unfurling and now aligning and calibrating the most capable space telescope in history is nearing fruition. While NASA has already released a number of "first light" images of photons of light moving through the James Webb Space Telescope's optical system, the jaw-dropping "first light" that has all …
Many Worlds 