Nightside of Venus captured with the IR2 (infrared) camera on JAXA's Akatsuki climate orbiter (JAXA). On September 14 at 3pm GMT, an embargo lifted on a research paper reporting evidence for biological activity on Venus. Speculation about the discovery had been spreading rapidly through social media for several days, proving that scientists are incapable of …
How Many Habitable Zone Planets Can Orbit a Host Star?
Our solar system has but one planet orbiting in what is commonly known as the habitable zone -- at a distance from the host star where water could be liquid at times rather than always ice or gas. That planet, of course, is Earth. But from a theoretical, dynamical perspective, does this always have to …
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For First Time, Tiny CubeSat Locates a Distant Exoplanet
The image above, courtesy of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, shows the CubeSat ASTERIA as it was being launched from the International Space Station in 2017. The size of a briefcase, ASTERIA is part of a growing armada of tiny spacecraft being launched around the world and adding an increasingly important (and inexpensive) set of …
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Viruses, the Virosphere and Astrovirology
When the word "virus" first came into use, it was as a "poison" and “a very small disease-causing agent.” While the presence of viruses was theorized earlier, they were not fully identified until the 1890s. So from their earliest discovery, viruses were synonymous with disease and generally of the ghastly epidemic type of disease …
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Everything Changes: The Rise and Fall of the Northern Ocean of Mars
Change is the one constant in our world-- moving in ways tiny and enormous, constructive and destructive. We're living now in a time when a rampaging pandemic circles the globe and when the climate is changing in so many worrisome and potentially devastating ways. With these ominous changes as a backdrop, it is perhaps useful …
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Planetary Protection and the Moons of Mars
Sometime in the early to mid-2020s, the capsule of the Japanese Martian Moons eXploration (MMX) mission is scheduled to arrive at the moons of Mars – Phobos and Deimos. These are small and desolate places, but one goal of the mission is large: to collect samples from the moons and bring them back to Earth. …
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Exploring Our Sun Will Help Us Understand Habitability
The surface of the sun, with each "kernel" or "cell" roughly the size of Texas. The movie is made up of images produced by the Daniel Inouye SolarTelescope in Hawaii. Novel and even revolutionary data and images are also expected from the Parker Solar Probe (which will travel into the sun's atmosphere, or corona) and …
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Big News for SETI Enthusiasts
It has been almost 60 years now that scientists -- a first a few intrepid souls and now many more -- have been searching the skies for radio signals that just might be coming from other advanced, technological civilizations. There have been some intriguing anomalies that created great interest, but nothing has to date survived …
Using Climate Science on Earth to Understand Planets Beyond Earth
Anthony Del Genio started out his career expecting to become first an engineer and then a geophysicist. He was in graduate school at UCLA and had been prepared by previous mentors to enter the geophysics field. But a 1973 department-wide test focused on seismology, rather than fields that he understood better, and his days as …
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How Long Were the Wet Periods on Early Mars, and Was That Water Chemically Suitable For Life?
There is no doubt that early Mars had long period of warmer and much wetter climates before its atmosphere thinned too much to retain that liquid H20 on the surface. As we know from the Curiosity mission to Gale Crater and other orbital findings, regions of that warmer and wetter Mars had flowing water …
Many Worlds 