Artist illustration of the EnVision orbiter at Venus (ESA/VR2Planets/DamiaBouic) It was quite a week for Venus scientists. Just seven days after NASA announced the selection of two Venus missions, DAVINCI+ and VERITAS, the European Space Agency (ESA) revealed that a third Venus mission had been chosen for the agency’s medium-class mission category. (See last week’s …
Continue reading "And Then There Were Three: ESA Follows NASA in Selecting a Mission to Venus"
Artists’ renderings show the VERITAS spacecraft (left) and DAVINCI+ probe (right) as they arrive at Venus (Lockheed Martin). For NASA scientists, Venus missions must feel like buses. You wait thirty years for one, and then two come along at once. Last week, NASA selected two Venus missions for the space agency’s Discovery Program; solar system …
It seems to happen with some regularity. Claims that Unidentified Flying Objects are visiting us have captured the public imagination once more and a big reveal is expected soon. That will come, oddly, from a government report required to be released by the end of June that will supposedly detail the many sightings made by …
Continue reading "Sure UFOs Exist. But There’s No Reason To Conclude That Aliens Are Flying Them"
These are heady days for the Chinese space program. On the heels of a successful 2019 mission to the dark side of the moon and the launch of the core of an ambitious low Earth orbit space station, the Chinese National Space Administration has done what only NASA has accomplished before -- landing a rover …
Continue reading "China’s Presence in Space Grows and So Do Its Accomplishments"
Searching for technologically advanced civilizations inhabiting distant exoplanets is the astrobiological equivalent of swinging for the fences. While much of the search of extraterrestrial life is now focused on microbes and chemical biosignatures in exoplanet atmospheres that would likely be byproducts of life, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (or SETI) takes a very different approach. …
What will it take to capture images and spectra of a distant world capable of harboring life? By Marc Kaufman Air & Space Magazine | Subscribe April 2021 Share to Facebook For all the excitement surrounding the search for distant exoplanets in recent years, the 4,000-plus planets confirmed so far have been unseen actors …
Continue reading "The Space Telescope That Could Find a Second Earth"
Different methods of searching for and finding distant exoplanets give different information about the planets found. The transit method -- where an exoplanets passed in front of its sun and dims the bright sunlight ever so slightly -- gives astronomers not only a detection but also its radius or size. The radial velocity method -- …
Continue reading "A Close Exoplanet Found That May Have An Atmosphere Ideal For Study"
Scientists have long held that many of the important compounds and elements that make life possible on Earth arrived here after the planet was formed and was orbiting the sun. These molecules came via meteorites and comets, it was thought, from the colder regions beyond Jupiter. But in a challenge to that long-accepted view, a …
Continue reading "New Insights Into How Earth Got Its Nitrogen"
In trying to tease out what a planet is made of, its density is of great importance. Scientists can use that measure of density -- the amount of matter contained in a given volume -- to determine what ratio of a planet is likely is gas, or water, or rocks, or rocks and iron and …
The more we learn about the billions upon billions of planets that orbit beyond our solar system, the more we are surprised by the wild menagerie of objects out there. From the start, many of these untolled planets have been startling, paradigm-breaking, mysterious, hellish, potentially habitable and just plain weird. Despite the confirmed detection of …
Many Worlds 