Jupiter is often described as the "big brother" planet of our solar system that made the formation and evolution of Earth possible. In the early days of the solar system, massive Jupiter helped the planet grow rapidly while serving as a gravity well that shielded the planet from the most violent planetesimal, asteroid and debris …
The Mars Water Story Takes an Important New Turn in Jezero Crater
The central and ever-surprising story of water on ancient Mars took a new turn recently when NASA announced that the Perseverance rover had found the fossil remains of a once-powerful river in Jezero Crater. From the nature and patterns of the riverbed turned to stone, to the ways that grains of sand and rocks been …
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Destination: Europa
"ALL THESE WORLDS ARE YOURS – EXCEPT EUROPA. ATTEMPT NO LANDING THERE." These are the words broadcast by the computer HAL as recounted in Arthur C. Clarke's book "2010: Odyssey Two," the sequel to the iconic "2001: A Space Odyssey." The message had been delivered to the computer by the non-corporeal David Bowman (the focus …
A New Model For How Earth Acquired Its Water
Theories abound on how Earth got its water. Most widely embraced is that asteroids, and maybe comets, crashed into our planet and released the water they held -- in the form of ice or hydrated minerals in their crystal structures -- and over time water became our oceans. The inflow was especially intense during what …
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Pam Conrad: The NASA Astrobiologist Who Also Became a Minister
Science and religion so often seem to be in conflict, with the chasm between them widening all the time. For many, the grounding of their religion is in faith and belief in powers beyond our understanding. For people of science, the grounding is in empirical facts and measurements that can be tested to help explain …
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What the JWST is Learning About Exoplanet Atmospheres
The James Webb Space Telescope is beginning to reveal previously unknowable facts about the composition of exoplanets -- about the presence or absence of atmospheres around the exoplanets and the makeup of any atmospheres that are detected. The results have been coming in for some months and they are a delight to scientists. And as …
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The Strange Interstellar Object Oumuamua Was a Comet and Not The Space Probe Some Had Proposed
In 2017, an unusual small object flew into our solar system from afar, approached the inner solar system and the Sun and then sped back out to interstellar space. In all, it was detected and followed for 11 days. The object was puzzling because such interstellar visitors had not been observed before, and most mysterious …
What Would Happen If Our Solar System Had a Super-Earth Like Many Others? Chaos.
Before astronomers began to find planets -- many, many planets -- orbiting Suns other than ours, the scientific consensus was that if other solar systems were ever found they would probably look much like ours. That would mean small, rocky planets closest to the Sun and large gaseous planets further out. That assumption crash and …
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A Scientific Bonanza From Asteroid Ryugu and Hayabusa2
Collecting and transporting back to Earth samples of other planets, moons, asteroids and comets is extremely difficult, costly and time-consuming. But as just-released papers based on Japan's Hayabusa2 sample return mission to the asteroid Ryugu make abundantly clear, the results can be fabulous. In a series of articles in the journal Science, scientists who studied …
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New Martian Surprise From The Curiosity Rover
In its more than a decade of exploring Gale Crater on Mars, the rover Curiosity has found innumerable signs of the presence of long-ago water. There have been fossil streams, alluvial fans, lakes shallow and deep, deltas and countless examples of rocks infiltrated and chemically transformed in the presence of water. The picture of the …
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Many Worlds 