NASA's Perseverance rover has been on Mars for fifteen months now and is about to begin its trek into the fossil delta of Jezero Crater. It's a big deal for the mission, because the delta is where water once flowed long enough and strongly enough to smooth, round and move large rocks. Since proof …
Continue reading "NASA’s Perseverance Rover on Mars; an Update"
All of life, from simplest to most complex, contains five information-passing compounds that allow the genetic code to work. These nitrogen-based compounds, called nucleobases, are found in all the the DNA and RNA that provide the instructions to build and operate every living thing on Earth. How these compounds are formed, or where they come …
Europa's ice crust is crossed by thousands of double ridges, pairs of long parallel raised lines with a small valleys in between, sometimes as much as hundreds of miles long and skyscraper-height tall rims. While these double ridges are ubiquitous on Europa's surface, how they form remains something of a mystery to scientists. Dustin Schroeder, …
When Eugene Parker was 16 years old, he decided he didn't want to spend the summer hanging out in suburban Detroit. So Parker went up to the state capital looking to buy some tax delinquent land held by the state. He selected a 40-acre piece of woods in far-off Cheboygan County, not far from …
The European Space Agency has decided that is currently impossible to continue any ongoing cooperation with the Russian space agency Roscosmos, and is moving forward with a "fast-track industrial study" to define how the mission can proceed without the Russians on its ambitious ExoMars astrobiology mission. In a release, ESA said that "as an intergovernmental …
The United States and Russia have cooperated extensively and well in building and operating the International Space Station since the plan was formalized in 1993. The European Space Agency, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, and the Canadian Space Agency have played major roles since the beginning, but it was first and foremost a U.S.-Russian venture. …
For the first time, the surface of Venus has been imaged in visible wavelengths from space. The camera on the Parker Solar Probe pierced through the thick Venusian cloud cover and captured blurred but extremely valuable images of the highlands and lowlands of the planet. The breakthrough images came thanks to a spacecraft with an …
The rugged and parched expanses of Western Australia are where many of the oldest signs of ancient life on Earth have been found, embedded in the sedimentary rocks that have been undisturbed there for eons. One particularly significant finding from the Tumbiana Formation contained a substantial and telltale excess of the carbon-12 isotope compared with …
Over the next three weeks-plus, the James Webb Space Telescope will play out an unfurling and deployment in deep space unlike anything this world has seen before. It took decades to perfect the observatory -- a segmented telescope on a heat shield the length of a tennis court that was squeezed for launch into a …
Continue reading "The Amazing Unfurling Of The James Webb Space Telescope"
Before the explosion in discovery of extrasolar planets, the field of comparative planetology was pretty limited -- confined to examining the differences between planets in our solar system and how they may have come to pass. But over the past quarter century, comparative planetology and the demographics of planets came to mean something quite different. …
Many Worlds 