NASA's InSight lander touched down at 11:54 Pacific Time and followed a seven-month, 300 million-mile (485 million kilometer) journey from Southern California that started back in May. InSight will spend the next few hours cleaning its camera lens and unfurling its solar arrays. Once NASA confirms that the solar arrays have been properly deployed, engineers …
Barnard’s Star, The "Great White Whale" of Planet Hunting, Has Surrendered Its Secret
Astronomers have found that Barnard's star -- a very close, fast-moving, and long studied red dwarf -- has a super-Earth sized planet orbiting just beyond its habitable zone. The discovery relied on data collected over many years using the tried-and-true radial velocity method, which searches for wobbles in the movement of the host star. …
Probing The Insides of Mars to Learn How Rocky Planets Are Formed
In the known history of our 4.5-billion-year-old solar system, the insides of but one planet have been explored and studied. While there's a lot left to know about the crust, the mantle and the core of the Earth, there is a large and vibrant field dedicated to that learning. Sometime next month, an extensive survey …
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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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What Would Happen If Mars And Venus Swapped Places?
What would happen if you switched the orbits of Mars and Venus? Would our solar system have more habitable worlds? It was a question raised at the “Comparative Climatology of Terrestrial Planets III”; a meeting held in Houston at the end of August. It brought together scientists from disciplines that included astronomers, climate science, …
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Prepare For Lift-off! BepiColombo Launches For Mercury
This Friday (October 19) at 10:45pm local time in French Guinea, a spacecraft is set to launch for Mercury. This is the BepiColombo mission which will begin its seven year journey to our solar system’s innermost planet. Surprisingly, the science goals for investigating this boiling hot world are intimately linked to habitability. Mercury orbits the …
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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 …
Time-Traveling in the Australian Outback in Search of Early Earth
This story was written by Nicholas Siegler, Chief Technologist for NASA’s Exoplanet Exploration Program at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory with the help of doctoral student Markus Gogouvitis, at the University of New South Wales, Australia and Georg-August-University in Gottingen, Germany. This past July I joined a group of geologists, geochemists, microbiologists, and fellow …
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Water Worlds, Aquaplanets and Habitability
The more exoplanet scientists learn about the billions and billions of celestial bodies out there, the more the question of unusual planets -- those with characteristics quite different from those in our solar system -- has come into play. Hot Jupiters, super-Earths, planets orbiting much smaller red dwarf stars -- they are all grist …
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Many Worlds 