Seldom has the planned end of a NASA mission brought so much expectation and scientific high drama. The Cassini mission to Saturn has already been a huge success, sending back iconic images and breakthrough science of the planet and its system. Included in the haul have been the discovery of plumes of water vapor spurting …
Continue reading "What Scientists Expect to Learn From Cassini’s Upcoming Plunge Into Saturn"
Let your mind wander for a moment and let it land on the most exciting and meaningful NASA mission that you can imagine. An undertaking, perhaps, that would send astronauts into deep space, that would require enormous technological innovation, and that would have ever-lasting science returns. Many will no doubt think of Mars and the …
The Many Worlds site has been down for almost two weeks following the crash of the server used to publish it. We never expected it would take quite this long to return to service, but now we are back with a column today and another one for early next week. Earth is most fortunate to …
Seven planets orbiting one star. All of them roughly the size of Earth. A record three in what is considered the habitable zone, the distance from the host star where liquid water could exist on the surface. The system a mere 40 light-years away. The latest impressive additions to the world of exoplanets orbit the …
Continue reading "A Solar System Found Crowded With Seven Earth-Sized Exoplanets"
For most of us, asteroids exist primarily as a threat. An asteroid that landed around the Yucatan peninsula, after all, is generally considered to have set into motion the changes that resulted in the elimination of the dinosaurs. Other large in-coming asteroids laid waste to swaths of Siberia in 1908, dug the world's largest crater …
This is a golden era for space and planetary science, a time when discoveries, new understandings, and newly-found mysteries are flooding in. There are so many reasons to find the drama intriguing: a desire to understand the physical forces at play, to learn how those forces led to the formation of Earth and ultimately us, …
Continue reading "Some Spectacular Images (And Science) From The Year Past"
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 …
It is often discussed within the community of exoplanet scientists that a danger lies in the description of intriguing exoplanets as "Earth-like." Nothing discovered so far warrants the designation, which is pretty nebulous anyway. Size and the planet's distance from a host star are usually what earn it the title "Earth-like," with its inescapable expectation …
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