Recent science missions and results are bringing the search for life closer to home. Scientists at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian (CfA) and the Florida Institute of Technology (FIT) may have figured out how to determine whether life on Mars, the Moon, and other rocky objects in the universe is — or ...
With the launch period for NASA’s Mars 2020 Perseverance rover opening in 14 weeks, final preparations for the spacecraft continue at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. In the past week, the assembly, test, and launch operations team completed important milestones, fueling the descent stage — also known as the sky crane — and attaching ...
Organic compounds called thiophenes are found on Earth in coal, crude oil, and oddly enough, in white truffles, the mushroom beloved by epicureans and wild pigs. Thiophenes were also recently discovered on Mars, and Washington State University astrobiologist Dirk Schulze‑Makuch thinks the presence of organic molecules would be consistent with the presence of early life ...
NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover has captured its highest-resolution panorama yet of the Martian surface. Composed of more than 1,000 images taken during the 2019 Thanksgiving holiday and carefully assembled over the ensuing months, the composite contains 1.8 billion pixels of Martian landscape. The rover’s Mast Camera, or Mastcam, used its telephoto lens to produce the panorama; ...
Death is inevitable. All things come to an end, as they say. And what comes from the earth, will always go back to its embrace. But what if, perchance, you were qualified to go on a voyage to one of the closest neighbors in our solar system — Mars? Say you had lived for a ...
A type of Martian aurora first identified by NASA’s MAVEN spacecraft in 2016 is actually the most common form occurring on the Red Planet, according to new results from the mission. The Martian aurora is known as a proton aurora and can help scientists track water loss from Mars’ atmosphere. On Earth, auroras are commonly seen ...
A key tracer used to estimate how much atmosphere Mars lost can change depending on the time of day and the surface temperature on the Red Planet, according to new observations by NASA-funded scientists. Previous measurements of this tracer — isotopes of oxygen — have disagreed significantly. An accurate measurement of this tracer is important ...
This week, scientists from NASA’s upcoming Mars 2020 mission joined their counterparts from the joint European-Russian ExoMars mission in an expedition to the Australian Outback, one of the most remote, arid regions on the planet. Both teams came to hone their research techniques before their missions launch to the Red Planet next summer in search ...
Approximately every two Earth years, when it is summer on the southern hemisphere of Mars, a window opens: Only there and only in this season can water vapor efficiently rise from the lower into the upper atmosphere. There, winds carry the rare gas to the North Pole. While part of the water vapor decays and ...
NASA’s first rover mission to Mars, the Pathfinder, imaged an extraterrestrial marine spillover landscape 22 years ago, according to a new paper by Planetary Science Institute Senior Scientist Alexis Rodriguez. The landing site is on the spillway of an ancient sea that experienced catastrophic floods released from the planet’s subsurface and its sediments. This could ...
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