Planets/Moons

Christopher Edwards joins multi-institutional team led by Caltech to design and build instrumentation for satellite to study the Moon's water cycle and make critical basemaps After a year of preliminary design and several reviews, NASA…

Rutgers-led study sheds light on subsurface melting of thick ice billions of years agoCredit: ESA/DLR/FU Berlin, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO. 3D rendered and colored by Lujendra Ojha The most habitable region for life on Mars would have been…

In roughly 200 million years, the continents will once again unite into a supercontinent; a new study explores how the next Pangea could affect the global climateCredit: Way et al. 2020 Long ago, all the continents were crammed…

An electrolysis system that doesn't need pure water may change the game when it comes to exploration When it comes to water and Mars, there's good news and not-so-good news. The good news: there's water on Mars! The not-so-good news?…

Giant planets that developed early in a star system's life could solve a mystery of why spiral structures are not observed in young protoplanetary discs, according to a new study by University of Warwick astronomers.Credit: University of…

What causes the weathering of the Mars moon Phobos? Results from TU Wien give new insights, soon a spacecraft will retrieve soil samples.Credit: TU Wien Of course, there is no weather in our sense of the word in space -…

Credit: Institute of Astronomy, University of Cambridge A unique stage of planetary system evolution has been imaged by astronomers, showing fast-moving carbon monoxide gas flowing away from a star system over 400 light years away, a…

New MIT Press looks at how intrepid astronomers at Palomar observatory changed our view of the universeCredit: Brianna Schweizer, 2020. Ever since 1936, pioneering scientists at Palomar Observatory in Southern California have pushed…

New research indicates that limited resources on Earth's satellite could cause crowding and competition as site selection, extraction become realityCredit: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center/DLR/ASU; Overlay: M. Elvis, A. Krosilowski, T.…

Astrophysicists reconstruct the galaxy merger history of our home galaxyCredit: J. Pfeffer, D. Kruijssen, R. Crain, N. Bastian Galaxies like the Milky Way formed by the merging of smaller progenitor galaxies. An international team of…

ITHACA, N.Y. - Floods of unimaginable magnitude once washed through Gale Crater on Mars' equator around 4 billion years ago - a finding that hints at the possibility that life may have existed there, according to data collected by NASA's…

Findings will contribute to NASA's mission to Titan in 2026Credit: Courtesy Northern Arizona University Scientists say Saturn's largest moon, Titan, is the only body in our solar system besides Earth with liquid on its surface.…

WASHINGTON--The press conference schedule and online media center are now live for Fall Meeting 2020, when more than 20,000 attendees from 110 countries are expected to assemble virtually for the largest worldwide conference in the…

Credit: Image by NASA/JPL-Caltech/M. Seibert (Carnegie Institution for Science)/K. Hoadley (Caltech)/GALEX Team In 2004, scientists with NASA's Galaxy Evolution Explorer spotted an object unlike any they'd seen in our Milky Way…

Credit: Andrzej Roma?ski The publication is the result of many months of observations of radiation coming from the plane of the Milky Way, namely from the spiral arms of our galaxy, where a lot of matter, dust and gas…

The uranium-bearing mineral zircon is an abundant constituent of Earth's continental crust, providing information about the age and origin of the continents and large geological features such as mountain chains and giant volcanoes. But…

An international team of scientists have shown that glycine, the simplest amino acid and an important building block of life, can form under the harsh conditions that govern chemistry in space. The results, published in Nature…

Researchers add second dating technique to prototype spaceflight instrumentCredit: SwRI SAN ANTONIO -- Nov. 16, 2020 -- A new study by Southwest Research Institute scientists describes how they have expanded the capabilities of the…

Credit: University of Arizona/Shane Stone/NASA Goddard/Dan Gallagher Scientists using an instrument aboard NASA's Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN, or MAVEN, spacecraft have discovered that water vapor near the surface of…

New UArizona-led research updates our understanding of how water escapes Mars - not like a leaky faucet but with a sudden splash. Mars once had oceans but is now bone-dry, leaving many to wonder how the water was lost. University of…