More than two decades before the first exoplanet was discovered, an experiment was performed using a moving flame and liquid mercury that could hold the key to habitability on tidally locked worlds. The paper was published in a 1969 edition of the international journal, Science, by researchers Schubert and Whitehead. The pair reported that …
Artifacts In Space
All of a sudden, we have spacecraft and objects both coming into our solar system and leaving for interstellar space. This is highly unusual, and very intriguing. The departing spacecraft is Voyager 2, which launched in 1977 and has traveled spaceward some 11 billion miles. It has now officially left the heliosphere, the protective …
InSight Lands on Mars For Unique Mission
NASA's InSight lander touched down at 11:54 Pacific Time and followed a seven-month, 300 million-mile (485 million kilometer) journey from Southern California that started back in May. InSight will spend the next few hours cleaning its camera lens and unfurling its solar arrays. Once NASA confirms that the solar arrays have been properly deployed, engineers …
Probing The Insides of Mars to Learn How Rocky Planets Are Formed
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 …
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The Kepler Space Telescope Mission Is Ending But Its Legacy Will Keep Growing.
The Kepler Space Telescope is dead. Long live the Kepler. NASA officials announced on Tuesday that the pioneering exoplanet survey telescope -- which had led to the identification of almost 2,700 exoplanets -- had finally reached its end, having essentially run out of fuel. This is after nine years of observing, after a malfunctioning …
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Prepare For Lift-off! BepiColombo Launches For Mercury
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 …
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Human Space Travel, Health and Risk
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 …
Curiosity Rover Looks Around Full Circle And Sees A Once Habitable World Through The Dust
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 …
Large Reservoir of Liquid Water Found Deep Below the Surface of Mars
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 …
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Back to the Future on the Moon
What does NASA's drive to return to the moon have to do with worlds of exoplanets and astrobiology that are generally discussed here? The answer is actually quite a lot. Not so much about the science, although current NASA plans would certainly make possible some very interesting science regarding humans living in deep space, as …
Many Worlds 