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 …
The Space Telescope That Could Find a Second Earth
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"
What Happened to All That Water on Ancient Mars? A New Theory With a Surprising Answer
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. …
NASA’s Perseverance Rover Lands on Mars — The Third Martian Arrival in a Week
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"
More Weird and Wild Planets
The more we learn about the billions upon billions of planets that orbit beyond our solar system, the more we are surprised by the wild menagerie of objects out there. From the start, many of these untolled planets have been startling, paradigm-breaking, mysterious, hellish, potentially habitable and just plain weird. Despite the confirmed detection of …
How Radioactive Elements May Make Planets Suitable or Hostile to Life
When describing exoplanets that are potentially promising candidates for life, scientists often use the terminology of the "habitable zone." This is a description of planets in orbit where temperatures, as predicted by the distance from the host star, are not too cold for liquid water to exist on a planetary surface and also not to …
Continue reading "How Radioactive Elements May Make Planets Suitable or Hostile to Life"
OSIRIS-REx Scoops The Surface of the Asteroid Bennu!
Surprising Insights Into the Asteroid Bennu’s Past, as OSIRIS-REx Prepares For a Sample-Collecting “Tag”
Long before there was an Earth, asteroids large and small were orbiting our young sun. Among them was one far enough out from the sun to contain water ice, as well as organic compounds with lots of carbon. In its five billion years or so as an object, the asteroid was hit and broken apart …
Why Not Assemble Space Telescopes In Space?
As we grow more ambitious in our desires to see further and more precisely in space, the need for larger and larger telescope mirrors becomes inevitable. Only with collection of significantly more photons by a super large mirror can the the quality of the "seeing" significantly improve. The largest mirror in space now is the …
Continue reading "Why Not Assemble Space Telescopes In Space?"
An “Elegant” New Theory on How Earth Became a Wet Planet
One of the enduring puzzles of our planet is why it is so wet. Since Earth formed relatively close to the sun, planetary scientists have generally held that any of the water in the building blocks of early-forming Earth was baked out and so was unavailable to make oceans or our atmosphere. That led to …
Continue reading "An “Elegant” New Theory on How Earth Became a Wet Planet"
Many Worlds 