The European Space Agency has decided that is currently impossible to continue any ongoing cooperation with the Russian space agency Roscosmos, and is moving forward with a "fast-track industrial study" to define how the mission can proceed without the Russians on its ambitious ExoMars astrobiology mission. In a release, ESA said that "as an intergovernmental …
The James Webb Space Telescope And Its Exoplanet Mission (Part 1)
The last time Many Worlds wrote about the James Webb Space Telescope, it was in the process of going through a high-stakes, super-complicated unfurling. About 50 autonomous deployments needed to occur after launch to set up the huge system, with 344 potential single point failures to overcome--individual steps that had to work for …
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Can We Trust a Handful of Grains to Tell Us About the Early Earth? A Look at the Hayabusa2 Asteroid Sample
The Hayabusa2 sample return capsule returning to Earth. The bright streak in the sky is the capsule, shock heated as it enters the Earth's atmosphere. The bright lights on the ground are buildings. (JAXA) In the early hours of December 6, 2020, what appeared to be a shooting star blazed across the sky above the …
More On The Very Hot Science of Stellar Flares and Their Implications For Habitability
Among the many scientific fields born, or reborn, by the rise of astrobiology and its search for life beyond Earth is the study of stars, including our own Sun. Now that we know that planets -- from the large and gaseous to the small and rocky -- are common in our galaxy and number in …
“Tantalizing” Carbon Signals From Mars
The rugged and parched expanses of Western Australia are where many of the oldest signs of ancient life on Earth have been found, embedded in the sedimentary rocks that have been undisturbed there for eons. One particularly significant finding from the Tumbiana Formation contained a substantial and telltale excess of the carbon-12 isotope compared with …
A Red Supergiant Star Is Caught Going Explosively Supernova, A First
When a large star reaches the end of its life it runs out of fuel, collapses and explodes into a supernova. The explosion releases enormous amounts of energy and light, turning a luminous object that is small at a distance into a large glowing ball. Supernova temperatures have been modeled to reach 6,000 times higher …
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The Amazing Unfurling Of The James Webb Space Telescope
Over the next three weeks-plus, the James Webb Space Telescope will play out an unfurling and deployment in deep space unlike anything this world has seen before. It took decades to perfect the observatory -- a segmented telescope on a heat shield the length of a tennis court that was squeezed for launch into a …
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A Huge Watery Reservoir May Lie Beneath the Surface of The “Grand Canyon” of Mars
That early Mars was much wetter and warmer than it is today has been well established by numerous missions. Water ice is visible at the poles and many fossil rivers have been found in the southern highlands of Mars. The Curiosity rover found as well that the large crater where it landed -- Gale Crater …
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What The James Webb Space Telescope Can Do For Exoplanet Science and What It Cannot Do
When the James Webb Space Telescope finally launches (late this month, if the schedule holds) it will forever change astronomy. Assuming that its complex, month-long deployment in space works as planned, it will become the most powerful and far-seeing observatory in the sky. It will have unprecedented capabilities to probe the earliest days of the …
Why Does Our Solar System Have No Super-Earths, and Other Questions for Comparative Planetology
Before the explosion in discovery of extrasolar planets, the field of comparative planetology was pretty limited -- confined to examining the differences between planets in our solar system and how they may have come to pass. But over the past quarter century, comparative planetology and the demographics of planets came to mean something quite different. …
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