Of the many barriers to a human trip to Mars where astronauts would land, explore and return to Earth, the absence of oxygen in the Martian atmosphere is a big one. Without oxygen that can be collected to support life and to provide fuel for a flight home, there can be no successful human …
Continue reading "NASA Suceeds in Making Precious Oxygen from Carbon Dioxide on Mars"
The James Webb Space Telescope has begun the part of its mission to study the atmospheres of 70 exoplanets in ways, and at a depth, well beyond anything done so far. The telescope is not likely to answer questions like whether there is life on distant planet -- its infrared wavelengths will tell us …
Continue reading "The James Webb Space Telescope Begins Looking at Exoplanets"
When it come to habitable environments in our solar system, there's Earth, perhaps Mars billions of years ago and then a slew of ice-covered moons that are likely to have global oceans under their crusts. Many of you are familiar with Europa (a moon of Jupiter) and Enceladus (a moon of Saturn) -- which have …
Continue reading "Icy Moons, And Exploring The Secrets They Hold"
Late last month, it appeared that Russian participation in the International Space Station would end in 2024 -- or so seemed to say the head of the Russian space agency, Roscosmos Thirty years of unusual and successful cooperation would be coming to a close as the Ukraine war appeared to make longer-term commitments impossible, or …
This movie is built from images taken over 10 days during the full perihelion encounter when the spacecraft was nearing the Sun's corona. The perihelion is a brief moment during the encounter time, when the spacecraft is at its closest point to the Sun. The movie is from orbit 10 and dates and distances are …
We can't see the heliosphere. We know where it starts but not really where it ends. And we are pretty certain that most stars, and therefore most planetary systems, are bounded by heliospheres, or "astropheres," as well. It has a measurable physical presence, but it is always changing. And although it is hardly well known, …
NASA's Perseverance rover has been on Mars for fifteen months now and is about to begin its trek into the fossil delta of Jezero Crater. It's a big deal for the mission, because the delta is where water once flowed long enough and strongly enough to smooth, round and move large rocks. Since proof …
Continue reading "NASA’s Perseverance Rover on Mars; an Update"
The European Space Agency has decided that is currently impossible to continue any ongoing cooperation with the Russian space agency Roscosmos, and is moving forward with a "fast-track industrial study" to define how the mission can proceed without the Russians on its ambitious ExoMars astrobiology mission. In a release, ESA said that "as an intergovernmental …
The last time Many Worlds wrote about the James Webb Space Telescope, it was in the process of going through a high-stakes, super-complicated unfurling. About 50 autonomous deployments needed to occur after launch to set up the huge system, with 344 potential single point failures to overcome--individual steps that had to work for …
Continue reading "The James Webb Space Telescope And Its Exoplanet Mission (Part 1)"
For the first time, the surface of Venus has been imaged in visible wavelengths from space. The camera on the Parker Solar Probe pierced through the thick Venusian cloud cover and captured blurred but extremely valuable images of the highlands and lowlands of the planet. The breakthrough images came thanks to a spacecraft with an …
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