Illustration of Mars with its two moons, Phobos and Deimos. (NASA/JPL-Caltech/Malin Space Science Systems/Texas A&M Univ.) The global success rate for sending missions to land on the moons of Mars has hardly been impressive -- coming in at zero out of three attempts. They were all led by the Russian (or former Soviet) space agencies, …
Continue reading "Phobos and Deimos: Captured Asteroids or Cut From Ancient Mars?"
As I prepare for the Astrobiology Science Conference (Abscicon) next week in Arizona, I'm struck by how many speakers will be discussing Europa missions, Europa science, ocean worlds and habitability under ice. NASA's Europa Clipper mission to orbit that moon, scheduled for launch to the Jupiter system in the mid 2020s, explains part of the …
Continue reading "NASA Panel Supports Life-Detecting Lander for Europa; Updated"
It wasn't that long ago that Enceladus, one of 53 moons of Saturn, was viewed as a kind of ho-hum object of no great importance. It was clearly frozen and situated in a magnetic field maelstrom caused by the giant planet nearby and those saturnine rings. That view was significantly modified in 2005 when scientists …
Seldom has the planned end of a NASA mission brought so much expectation and scientific high drama. The Cassini mission to Saturn has already been a huge success, sending back iconic images and breakthrough science of the planet and its system. Included in the haul have been the discovery of plumes of water vapor spurting …
Continue reading "What Scientists Expect to Learn From Cassini’s Upcoming Plunge Into Saturn"
It has been four long decades since NASA has sent an officially-designated life detection mission into space. The confused results of the Viking missions to Mars in the mid 1970s were so controversial and contradictory that scientists -- or the agency at least -- concluded that the knowledge needed to convincingly search for extraterrestrial life …
Continue reading "NASA Panel Supports Life-Detecting Lander for Europa"
Sometimes images arrive that make it clear that the space age is not a throw-away line, but a reality. This one was taken by a satellite orbiting Mars, and it shows the Earth and the moon. Kind of remarkable, given that the camera -- the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA's Mars …
For years, noted chemist and synthetic life researcher Steven Benner has talked about the necessary role of the element boron in the origin of life. Without boron, he has found, many of the building blocks needed to form the earliest self-replicating ribonucleic acid (RNA) fall apart when they come into contact with water, which is …
Of all the possible life-beyond-Earth questions hanging fire, few are quite so intriguing as those surrounding the now famous plumes of the moon Enceladus: what telltale molecules are in the constantly escaping jets of water vapor, and what dynamics inside the moon are pushing them out? Seldom, if ever before, have scientists been given such …
Though on holiday, I wanted to share these images and a bit of the Juno at Jupiter news. Because telescopes have never been able to see clearly down through the thick clouds of Jupiters-- the ones that together form the planet's glorious stripes-- it has remained a mystery how deep they may be. Based on …
Continue reading "Jupiter’s Stripes Run Deep, But Hopefully Juno’s Problems Do Not"
Before the Curiosity rover landed on Mars, NASA's "follow the water"maxim had already delivered results that suggested a watery past and just maybe some water not far below the surface today that would periodically break through on sun-facing slopes. While tantalizing -- after all, the potential presence of liquid water on a exoplanet's surface is …
Many Worlds 