For the first time ever, a sample of pulverized rock from another planet has been drilled, collected and stored for eventual delivery to the highest-tech labs on Earth. Yes, a storehouse of rocks were collected on the moon by Apollo astronauts and delivered to Houston, and some small samples of two asteroids and one comet …
Continue reading "Sample Return from Mars Begins in Earnest"
Planets beyond our solar system, we now know, come in all shapes, sizes and consistencies. There are rocky planets, water worlds, gaseous planets, super-Earths, hot Jupiters, tidally locked planets, planets in orbital resonance with each other, and so much more. A group of exoplanet researchers at the University of Cambridge have recently proposed a new …
Some time later this summer, it is predicted, the National Academy of Sciences will release its long-awaited Decadal Survey for astrophysics, which is expected to recommend the science and architecture that NASA should embrace for its next "Great Observatory." Many Worlds earlier featured one of the four concepts in the running -- LUVOIR or the …
It seems to happen with some regularity. Claims that Unidentified Flying Objects are visiting us have captured the public imagination once more and a big reveal is expected soon. That will come, oddly, from a government report required to be released by the end of June that will supposedly detail the many sightings made by …
Continue reading "Sure UFOs Exist. But There’s No Reason To Conclude That Aliens Are Flying Them"
Searching for technologically advanced civilizations inhabiting distant exoplanets is the astrobiological equivalent of swinging for the fences. While much of the search of extraterrestrial life is now focused on microbes and chemical biosignatures in exoplanet atmospheres that would likely be byproducts of life, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (or SETI) takes a very different approach. …
One of the fondest dreams and top priorities of space science for years has been to bring a piece of Mars back to Earth to study in the kind of depth possible only in a cutting-edge laboratory. While the instruments on Mars rovers can tell us a lot, returning a sample to study here on …
What will it take to capture images and spectra of a distant world capable of harboring life? By Marc Kaufman Air & Space Magazine | Subscribe April 2021 Share to Facebook For all the excitement surrounding the search for distant exoplanets in recent years, the 4,000-plus planets confirmed so far have been unseen actors …
Continue reading "The Space Telescope That Could Find a Second Earth"
Mars is receiving visitors these days. Quite a few of them. The most prominent visitor is NASA's Perseverance rover, which made a difficult but smooth precision landing at 3.55 ET this afternoon. The rover now sits in Jezero Crater, in an area that clearly once had lots of water flowing. The site was selected, in …
Continue reading "NASA’s Perseverance Rover Lands on Mars — The Third Martian Arrival in a Week"
When describing exoplanets that are potentially promising candidates for life, scientists often use the terminology of the "habitable zone." This is a description of planets in orbit where temperatures, as predicted by the distance from the host star, are not too cold for liquid water to exist on a planetary surface and also not to …
Continue reading "How Radioactive Elements May Make Planets Suitable or Hostile to Life"
What started as a stunning announcement that the chemical phosphine -- a known byproduct of life -- had been found in the clouds of Venus and could signal the presence of some lifeform has now been strongly critiqued by a number of groups of scientists. As a result, there is growing doubt that the finding, …
Many Worlds 