The last time Many Worlds wrote about the James Webb Space Telescope, it was in the process of going through a high-stakes, super-complicated unfurling. About 50 autonomous deployments needed to occur after launch to set up the huge system, with 344 potential single point failures to overcome--individual steps that had to work for …
Continue reading "The James Webb Space Telescope And Its Exoplanet Mission (Part 1)"
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. …
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"
Anthony Del Genio started out his career expecting to become first an engineer and then a geophysicist. He was in graduate school at UCLA and had been prepared by previous mentors to enter the geophysics field. But a 1973 department-wide test focused on seismology, rather than fields that he understood better, and his days as …
Continue reading "Using Climate Science on Earth to Understand Planets Beyond Earth"
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 …
An extensive, congressionally-directed study of what NASA needs to effectively learn how exoplanets form and whether some may support life was released today, and it calls for major investments in next-generation space and ground telescopes. It also calls for the adoption of an increasingly multidisciplinary approach for addressing the innumerable questions that remain unanswered. …
What observations, or groups of observations, would tell exoplanet scientists that life might be present on a particular distant planet? The most often discussed biosignature is oxygen, the product of life on Earth. But while oxygen remains central to the search for biosignatures afar, there are some serious problems with relying on that molecule. It …
What observations, or groups of observations, would tell exoplanet scientists that life might be present on a particular distant planet? The most often discussed biosignature is oxygen, the product of life on Earth. But while oxygen remains central to the search for biosignatures afar, there are some serious problems with relying on that molecule. It …
I regret that the formatting of this column was askew earlier; I hope it didn't make reading too difficult. But now those problems are fixed. Behind the front page space science discoveries that tell us about the intricacies and wonders of our world are generally years of technical and intellectual development, years of planning and …
Continue reading "Putting Together a Community Strategy To Search for Extraterrestrial Life"
I regret that the formatting of this column was askew earlier; I hope it didn't make reading too difficult. But now those problems are fixed. Behind the front page space science discoveries that tell us about the intricacies and wonders of our world are generally years of technical and intellectual development, years of planning and …
Continue reading "Putting Together a Community Strategy To Search for Extraterrestrial Life"
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