I was moved to weigh in after reading Vice President Mike Pence's comments last week down at the Kennedy Space Center -- a speech that seemed to minimize NASA's performance in recent years (decades?) and to propose a return to a kind of Manifest Destiny way of thinking in space. The speech did not appear …
Continue reading "Has America Really Lost It's "Lead in Space?""
This article of mine, slightly tweaked for Many Worlds, first appeared today (July 6) in Astrobiology Magazine, http://www.astrobio.net As NASA inches closer to launching new missions to the Solar System’s outer moons in search of life, scientists are renewing their focus on developing a set of universal characteristics of life that can be measured. …
This article of mine, slightly tweaked for Many Worlds, first appeared today (July 6) in Astrobiology Magazine, http://www.astrobio.net As NASA inches closer to launching new missions to the Solar System’s outer moons in search of life, scientists are renewing their focus on developing a set of universal characteristics of life that can be measured. There …
I hope you will indulge me in this foray into a very different look at the many worlds in which we live. My father is being buried today. It is no tragedy; he lived to almost 97 and had a full life. But still... As all of you have no doubt experienced in one way …
I hope you will indulge me in this foray into a very different look at the many worlds in which we live. My father is being buried today. It is no tragedy; he lived to almost 97 and had a full life. But still... As all of you have no doubt experienced in one way …
Sometimes personal affairs intervene for all of us, and they have now for your Many Worlds writer and his elderly father. But rather than remain off the radar screen, I wanted to repost this column which has a new import. It turns out that versions of the instrument described below -- a miniature gene …
Continue reading "In Search of Panspermia (and Life on Icy Moons)"
Sometimes personal affairs intervene for all of us, and they have now for your Many Worlds writer and his elderly father. But rather than remain off the radar screen, I wanted to repost this column which has a new import. It turns out that versions of the instrument described below -- a miniature gene …
Continue reading "In Search of Panspermia (and Life on Icy Moons)"
Illustration of Mars with its two moons, Phobos and Deimos. (NASA/JPL-Caltech/Malin Space Science Systems/Texas A&M Univ.) The global success rate for sending missions to land on the moons of Mars has hardly been impressive -- coming in at zero out of three attempts. They were all led by the Russian (or former Soviet) space agencies, …
Continue reading "Phobos and Deimos: Captured Asteroids or Cut From Ancient Mars?"
American attention regarding space missions is, not surprisingly, focused primarily on NASA missions. But there is a lot more exploration underway, and we should know about it. This is a guest column by Elizabeth Tasker, an Associate Professor at the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, JAXA, and whose book, "The Planet Factory", comes out in November …
Continue reading "Phobos and Deimos: Captured Asteroids or Cut From Ancient Mars?"
Sometimes lost in the discussion of exoplanets and habitability is where the potential building blocks of life might come from and how they got there. Yes, hydrogen and water and methane and carbon and nitrogen have been found in abundance around the cosmos, but how about the larger and more esoteric compounds needed for life …
Many Worlds 