In a solar system far, far away, life of some sort is just waiting to be found. Or so the world of astrobiology sure hopes it is. The new player in the astrobiology world, now called the Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO), is planned to launch in the 2040s if all goes well. While it's possible …
Continue reading "Preparing For The Habitable Worlds Observatory, Our Best Shot at Finding ET Life"
An Indian spacecraft landed on the moon this month and a pioneering Japanese lunar lander is awaiting an imminent launch. A Russian craft trying to land in the same area -- the southern polar region -- recently crashed, as did a private effort by a joint Japanese-United Arab Emirates group and one by several Israeli …
Continue reading "The Moon Rush Is On. Are We on Earth Ready For That?"
There are three planets or moons in our solar system known to now have, or once had, surface rivers, lakes, deltas and a hydrologic system. There's Earth, of course, Mars long ago when it was warmer and wetter, and the so different yet so similar rivers of hydrocarbons on Saturn's moon, Titan. Understanding the dynamics …
Continue reading "The Familiar, Yet So Different, Hydrocarbon Rivers of Titan"
The elements needed for life as we know it are carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen sulfur and phosphorus. Before today, planetary scientists could say that five of those crucial elements had been found in the watery spray that spurts out of the Saturn's moon, Enceladus. All that was missing was phosphorus. But today research presented in …
The central and ever-surprising story of water on ancient Mars took a new turn recently when NASA announced that the Perseverance rover had found the fossil remains of a once-powerful river in Jezero Crater. From the nature and patterns of the riverbed turned to stone, to the ways that grains of sand and rocks been …
Continue reading "The Mars Water Story Takes an Important New Turn in Jezero Crater"
"ALL THESE WORLDS ARE YOURS – EXCEPT EUROPA. ATTEMPT NO LANDING THERE." These are the words broadcast by the computer HAL as recounted in Arthur C. Clarke's book "2010: Odyssey Two," the sequel to the iconic "2001: A Space Odyssey." The message had been delivered to the computer by the non-corporeal David Bowman (the focus …
The James Webb Space Telescope was developed to allow us to see the cosmos in a new way -- with much greater precision, using infrared wavelengths to piece through dust around galaxies, stars and planets, and to look further back into time and space. In the less than four months since the first Webb images …
Continue reading "The Cosmos, As Viewed By The James Webb Space Telescope"
For NASA to extend its space science missions well past their original lifetime in space has become such a commonplace that it is barely noticed. The Curiosity rover was scheduled to last on Mars for two years but now it has been going for a decade -- following the pace set by earlier, smaller Mars …
Continue reading "The Juno Spacecraft Images Jupiter’s Moon Europa as it Speeds Past"
As a test of our ability to damage a potentially hazardous asteroid heading our way, or perhaps to give it enough of a push that the asteroid's path is changed enough to render it harmless, a NASA spacecraft tonight successfully collided with an asteroid some 6.8 mllion miles away. The Dart spacecraft – short for …
For more than two decades now, the Virtual Planetary Laboratory (VPL) at the University of Washington in Seattle has been at the forefront of the crucial and ever-challenging effort to model how scientists can determine whether a particular exoplanet is capable of supporting life or perhaps even had life on it already. To do this, …
Many Worlds 