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"
Now on Facebook: http://facebook.com/nexssmanyworlds/ The era of directly imaging exoplanets has only just begun, but the science and viewing pleasures to come are appealingly apparent. This evocative movie of four planets more massive than Jupiter orbiting the young star HR 8799 is a composite of sorts, including images taken over seven years at the W.M. …
Continue reading "A Four Planet System in Orbit, Directly Imaged and Remarkable"
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"
Understanding the make-up and dynamics of atmospheric clouds is crucial to our interpretations of how weather and climate behave on Earth, and so it should come as no surprise that clouds are similarly essential to learning the nature and behavior of exoplanets. On many exoplanets, thick clouds and related, though different, hazes have been …
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 …
Europa is a moon no bigger than our own and is covered by deep layers of ice, but it brings with it a world of promise. Science fiction master and sometimes space visionary Arthur C. Clarke, after all, named it as the most likely spot in our solar system to harbor life, and wrote a …
The search for life beyond our solar system has focused largely on the detection of an ever-increasing number of exoplanets, determinations of whether the planets are in a habitable zone, and what the atmospheres of those planets might look like. It is a sign of how far the field has progressed that scientists are now …
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