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"
The more we learn about the billions upon billions of planets that orbit beyond our solar system, the more we are surprised by the wild menagerie of objects out there. From the start, many of these untolled planets have been startling, paradigm-breaking, mysterious, hellish, potentially habitable and just plain weird. Despite the confirmed detection of …
For almost 30 years now, the Hubble Space Telescope has transformed how we see the cosmos. In terms of scientific output as well as making visible the splendors of the sky above us, the Hubble has been arguably the most consequential telescope ever to peer into space. To commemorate 30 years of Hubble science and …
Continue reading "Sparkling Gifts From the Hubble Space Telescope, Thirty Years Into Its Mission"
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, …
As we grow more ambitious in our desires to see further and more precisely in space, the need for larger and larger telescope mirrors becomes inevitable. Only with collection of significantly more photons by a super large mirror can the the quality of the "seeing" significantly improve. The largest mirror in space now is the …
Continue reading "Why Not Assemble Space Telescopes In Space?"
One of the enduring puzzles of our planet is why it is so wet. Since Earth formed relatively close to the sun, planetary scientists have generally held that any of the water in the building blocks of early-forming Earth was baked out and so was unavailable to make oceans or our atmosphere. That led to …
Continue reading "An “Elegant” New Theory on How Earth Became a Wet Planet"
The first images of the sun from the European Space Agency/NASA’s Solar Orbiter have been released and are stupendous. They are the closest photos ever taken of the star that we orbit, and have already revealed some fascinating features that nobody knew existed. Launched early this year, the spacecraft completed its first close pass of …
https://videopress.com/v/SgQvMH55?preloadContent=metadata Scenes from the virtual reality talk on Hayabusa2 with students from the Yokohama International School. Each student has a robot avatar they can use to look around the scene, talk with other people and interact with objects. (OmniScope) Have you ever wondered what it would be like to stand on an asteroid? A rugged …
Many Worlds 