When Buzz Aldrin became the second man to ever walk on the moon, his lunar escapades, along with those of Neil Armstrong, were a cause of national and pretty much global joy, wonder and pride. That the mission was hazardous was self-evident -- from launch to the ad-lib and hair-raising landing on the moon, …
The Moon-Forming Impact And Its Gifts
The question of how life-essential elements such as carbon, nitrogen and sulfur came to our planet has been long debated and is a clearly important and slippery scientific subject. Did these volatile elements accrete onto the proto-Earth from the sun's planetary disk as the planet was being formed? Did they arrive substantially later …
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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Technosignatures and the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence
The word "SETI" pretty much brings to mind the search for radio signals come from distant planets, the movie "Contact," Jill Tarter, Frank Drake and perhaps the SETI Institute, where the effort lives and breathes. But there was a time when SETI -- the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence -- was a significantly broader concept, that …
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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 …
A National Strategy for Finding and Understanding Exoplanets (and Possibly Extraterrestrial Life)
An extensive, congressionally-directed study of what NASA needs to effectively learn how exoplanets form and whether some may support life was released today, and it calls for major investments in next-generation space and ground telescopes. It also calls for the adoption of an increasingly multidisciplinary approach for addressing the innumerable questions that remain unanswered. …
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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A New Frontier for Exoplanet Hunting
The first exoplanets were all found using the radial velocity method of measuring the "wobble" of a star -- movement caused by the gravitational pull of an orbiting planet. Radial velocity has been great for detecting large exoplanets relatively close to our solar system, for assessing their mass and for finding out how long …
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 …
Breakthrough Findings on Mars Organics and Mars Methane
A decades-long quest for incontrovertible and complex Martian organics -- the chemical building blocks of life -- is over. After almost six years of searching, drilling and analyzing on Mars, the Curiosity rover team has conclusively detected three types of naturally-occurring organics that had not been identified before on the planet. The Mars organics Science …
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Many Worlds 