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. …
The helicopter Ingenuity has now flown three times on Mars and has proven itself to be a dependable (for now) and potentially ground-breaking addition to Mars science. Ingenuity, brought to Mars as part of the Perseverance rover landing, took off early Sunday morning on its third and most ambitious Martian mission yet. The 4-pound …
One of the fondest dreams and top priorities of space science for years has been to bring a piece of Mars back to Earth to study in the kind of depth possible only in a cutting-edge laboratory. While the instruments on Mars rovers can tell us a lot, returning a sample to study here on …
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"
Once it became clear in the past decade that the surface of ancient Mars, the inevitable question arose regarding what happened to it all since the planet is today so very dry. And the widely-accepted answer has been that the water escaped into space, especially after the once thicker atmosphere of Mars was stripped away. …
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"
Optical and X-ray (cut-out) image of the Alpha Centauri binary stars (Optical: Zdenek Bardon; X-ray: NASA/CXC/Univ. of Colorado/T. Ayres et al.) There is something terribly exciting about actually seeing an exoplanet. While we have discovered over 4,000 planets outside the solar system, the majority of these worlds have been identified through their influence on their …
Continue reading "The Directly Imaged World Around α Centauri?"
Mars is receiving visitors these days. Quite a few of them. The most prominent visitor is NASA's Perseverance rover, which made a difficult but smooth precision landing at 3.55 ET this afternoon. The rover now sits in Jezero Crater, in an area that clearly once had lots of water flowing. The site was selected, in …
Continue reading "NASA’s Perseverance Rover Lands on Mars — The Third Martian Arrival in a Week"
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"
Many Worlds 