This is Apollo memory month, when the 50th anniversary arrives of the first landing of astronauts on the moon. It was a very big deal and certainly deserves attention and applause. But there's something unsettling about the anniversary as well, a sense that the human exploration side of NASA's mission has disappointed and that its …
Continue reading "Curiosity Rover as Seen From High Above by Mars Orbiter"
A vehicle that flies like a drone and will try to unravel some of the mysteries of Saturn's moon Titan was selected yesterday to be the next New Frontiers mission to explore the solar system. Searching for the building blocks of life, the Dragonfly mission will be able to fly multiple sorties to sample …
Continue reading "NASA Announces Astrobiology Mission to Titan"
The Nexus for Exoplanet System Science, or “NExSS,” began four years ago as a NASA initiative to bring together a wide range of scientists involved generally in the search for life on planets outside our solar system. With teams from seventeen academic and NASA centers, NExSS was founded on the conviction that this search …
With so many exoplanets already detected, with the pace of discovery continuing to be so fast, and with efforts to find more distant worlds so constant and global, it's easy to become somewhat blase´ about new discoveries. After so many "firsts," and so many different kinds of planets found in very different ways, it certainly …
The Kepler Space Telescope is dead. Long live the Kepler. NASA officials announced on Tuesday that the pioneering exoplanet survey telescope -- which had led to the identification of almost 2,700 exoplanets -- had finally reached its end, having essentially run out of fuel. This is after nine years of observing, after a malfunctioning …
Continue reading "The Kepler Space Telescope Mission Is Ending But Its Legacy Will Keep Growing."
What would happen if you switched the orbits of Mars and Venus? Would our solar system have more habitable worlds? It was a question raised at the “Comparative Climatology of Terrestrial Planets III”; a meeting held in Houston at the end of August. It brought together scientists from disciplines that included astronomers, climate science, …
Continue reading "What Would Happen If Mars And Venus Swapped Places?"
The word "SETI" pretty much brings to mind the search for radio signals come from distant planets, the movie "Contact," Jill Tarter, Frank Drake and perhaps the SETI Institute, where the effort lives and breathes. But there was a time when SETI -- the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence -- was a significantly broader concept, that …
Continue reading "Technosignatures and the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence"
A decades-long quest for incontrovertible and complex Martian organics -- the chemical building blocks of life -- is over. After almost six years of searching, drilling and analyzing on Mars, the Curiosity rover team has conclusively detected three types of naturally-occurring organics that had not been identified before on the planet. The Mars organics Science …
Continue reading "Breakthrough Findings on Mars Organics and Mars Methane"
A quick update on a recent column about whether our "golden age" of space science and discovery was in peril because of cost overruns and Trump administration budget priorities that emphasized human space travel over science. The 2018 omnibus spending bill that was passed Wednesday night by the House of Representatives and Thursday night …
A quick update on a recent column about whether our "golden age" of space science and discovery was in peril because of cost overruns and Trump administration budget priorities that emphasized human space travel over science. The 2018 omnibus spending bill that was passed Wednesday night by the House of Representatives and Thursday night by …
Many Worlds 