In the known history of our 4.5-billion-year-old solar system, the insides of but one planet have been explored and studied. While there's a lot left to know about the crust, the mantle and the core of the Earth, there is a large and vibrant field dedicated to that learning. Sometime next month, an extensive survey …
Continue reading "Probing The Insides of Mars to Learn How Rocky Planets Are Formed"
This Friday (October 19) at 10:45pm local time in French Guinea, a spacecraft is set to launch for Mercury. This is the BepiColombo mission which will begin its seven year journey to our solar system’s innermost planet. Surprisingly, the science goals for investigating this boiling hot world are intimately linked to habitability. Mercury orbits the …
Continue reading "Prepare For Lift-off! BepiColombo Launches For Mercury"
We all know that human space travel is risky. Always has been and always will be. Imagine, for a second, that you're an astronaut about to be sent on a journey to Mars and back, and you're in a capsule on top of NASA's second-generation Space Launch System designed for that task. You will …
https://youtu.be/lcJLZfPiyfc An annotated 360-degree view from the Curiosity mast camera. Dust remaining from an enormous recent storm can be seen on the platform and in the sky. And holes in the tires speak of the rough terrain Curiosity has traveled, but now avoids whenever possible. Make the screen bigger for best results and enjoy the …
Far beneath the frigid surface of the South Pole of Mars is probably the last place where you might expect the first large body of Martian liquid water would be found. It's -170 F on the surface, there are no known geothermal sources that could warm the subterranean ice to make a meltwater lake, and …
Continue reading "Large Reservoir of Liquid Water Found Deep Below the Surface of Mars"
Huge escarpments of quite pure water ice have been found in the Southern Highlands of Mars -- accessible enough that astronauts might some day be able to turn the ice into water, hydrogen and oxygen. Some of these deposits are more than 100 meters thick and begin only a meter or two below the …
Continue reading "The Mars Water Story Gets Ever More Interesting"
Unmanned missions to planets and moons and asteroids in our solar system have been some of NASA's most successful efforts in recent years, with completed or on-going ventures to Mars, Saturn, Jupiter, the asteroid Bennu, our moon, Pluto, Mercury and bodies around them all. On deck are a funded mission to Europa, another to Mars …
Continue reading "Two Tempting Reprise Missions: Explore Titan or Bring Back a Piece of A Comet"
As the Cassini mission embarks on its final dive this Friday into Saturn, it will continue taking photos all the way down (or as far as it remains operations.) We've grown accustomed to seeing remarkable images for the mission and the planet, but clearly the show is not over, and perhaps far from it. …
Continue reading "Cassini Nearing the End, Still Working Hard"
The triumphant Cassini mission to Saturn will be coming to an end on September 15, when the spacecraft dives into the planet. Running out of fuel, NASA chose to end the mission that way rather than run the risk of having the vehicle wander and ultimately land on Europa or Enceladus, potentially contaminating two …
Asteroid, we've long been told, started tiny in our protoplanetary disk and only very gradually became more massive through a process of accretion. They collected dust from the gas cloud that surrounded our new star, and then grew larger through collisions with other growing asteroids. But in recent years, a new school of thought …
Continue reading "Primordial Asteroids, And The Stories They Are Telling"
Many Worlds 