Bits of pebbles and dust from the asteriod Bennu that were collected during the long journey of the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft should be landing in the Utah desert later this month. The delivery will be a first for NASA -- its first sample return from an asteroid and one of a very small handful of space …
Destination: Europa
"ALL THESE WORLDS ARE YOURS – EXCEPT EUROPA. ATTEMPT NO LANDING THERE." These are the words broadcast by the computer HAL as recounted in Arthur C. Clarke's book "2010: Odyssey Two," the sequel to the iconic "2001: A Space Odyssey." The message had been delivered to the computer by the non-corporeal David Bowman (the focus …
The Strange Interstellar Object Oumuamua Was a Comet and Not The Space Probe Some Had Proposed
In 2017, an unusual small object flew into our solar system from afar, approached the inner solar system and the Sun and then sped back out to interstellar space. In all, it was detected and followed for 11 days. The object was puzzling because such interstellar visitors had not been observed before, and most mysterious …
What Would Happen If Our Solar System Had a Super-Earth Like Many Others? Chaos.
Before astronomers began to find planets -- many, many planets -- orbiting Suns other than ours, the scientific consensus was that if other solar systems were ever found they would probably look much like ours. That would mean small, rocky planets closest to the Sun and large gaseous planets further out. That assumption crash and …
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A Scientific Bonanza From Asteroid Ryugu and Hayabusa2
Collecting and transporting back to Earth samples of other planets, moons, asteroids and comets is extremely difficult, costly and time-consuming. But as just-released papers based on Japan's Hayabusa2 sample return mission to the asteroid Ryugu make abundantly clear, the results can be fabulous. In a series of articles in the journal Science, scientists who studied …
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New Martian Surprise From The Curiosity Rover
In its more than a decade of exploring Gale Crater on Mars, the rover Curiosity has found innumerable signs of the presence of long-ago water. There have been fossil streams, alluvial fans, lakes shallow and deep, deltas and countless examples of rocks infiltrated and chemically transformed in the presence of water. The picture of the …
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Tantalizing Organic Compounds Found on Mars
When searching for signs of ancient life on Mars, NASA scientists increasingly focus on organic material -- the carbon-based compounds that are the building blocks of life. Organics were found by the Curiosity rover in Gale Crater, and now new papers report they have also been identified by the instruments of the Perseverance rover in …
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Did Ancient Mars Life Kill Itself Off?
The presence of life brings many unexpected consequences. On Earth, for instance, when cyanobacteria spread widely in ancient oceans more than two billion years ago, their production of increasingly large amounts of oxygen killed off much of the other anaerobic life present at the day because oxygen is a toxin, unless an organism finds ways …
Where Might Plumes of Water Vapor Come From on Icy Moons?
It's been some years since Europa scientists agreed that the Jovian moon has a large global ocean beneath miles of ice. More recently, scientists have identified what they view as pockets of water surrounded by ice but much nearer the surface than the ocean below. And there has been research as well into what may …
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The Juno Spacecraft Images Jupiter’s Moon Europa as it Speeds Past
For NASA to extend its space science missions well past their original lifetime in space has become such a commonplace that it is barely noticed. The Curiosity rover was scheduled to last on Mars for two years but now it has been going for a decade -- following the pace set by earlier, smaller Mars …
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Many Worlds 