When it come to habitable environments in our solar system, there's Earth, perhaps Mars billions of years ago and then a slew of ice-covered moons that are likely to have global oceans under their crusts. Many of you are familiar with Europa (a moon of Jupiter) and Enceladus (a moon of Saturn) -- which have …
Continue reading "Icy Moons, And Exploring The Secrets They Hold"
This movie is built from images taken over 10 days during the full perihelion encounter when the spacecraft was nearing the Sun's corona. The perihelion is a brief moment during the encounter time, when the spacecraft is at its closest point to the Sun. The movie is from orbit 10 and dates and distances are …
In the earliest days of our solar system -- before any planets had been cobbled together -- the recently formed Sun was circled by cosmic gas and dust. Over time, fragments of rock formed from the dust and many of these orbiting rocks smashed together and some became the gradually larger components of planets-to-be. Others …
Europa's ice crust is crossed by thousands of double ridges, pairs of long parallel raised lines with a small valleys in between, sometimes as much as hundreds of miles long and skyscraper-height tall rims. While these double ridges are ubiquitous on Europa's surface, how they form remains something of a mystery to scientists. Dustin Schroeder, …
When Eugene Parker was 16 years old, he decided he didn't want to spend the summer hanging out in suburban Detroit. So Parker went up to the state capital looking to buy some tax delinquent land held by the state. He selected a 40-acre piece of woods in far-off Cheboygan County, not far from …
For the first time, the surface of Venus has been imaged in visible wavelengths from space. The camera on the Parker Solar Probe pierced through the thick Venusian cloud cover and captured blurred but extremely valuable images of the highlands and lowlands of the planet. The breakthrough images came thanks to a spacecraft with an …
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 …
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 …
Continue reading "A Huge Watery Reservoir May Lie Beneath the Surface of The “Grand Canyon” of Mars"
Metal asteroids offer something rare in the solar system -- the core of a planet without all the rock that normally surrounds it. Since it is impossible to directly examine a planetary or lunar core if the parent body remains intact, metal-rich asteroids where the upper mantle and crust layers have been lost to a …
Jupiter's moon Europa is almost five times as far away from the sun as Earth is, with surface temperatures that don't rise above minus 260 degrees Fahrenheit. It's slightly smaller than our moon and orbits but 400,000 miles from the solar system's largest planet, which it takes but 3.5 Earth days to orbit. As a …
Many Worlds 