CHICAGO — The last key ingredient for life has been discovered on Saturn’s icy moon Enceladus. Phosphorus is a vital building block of life, used to construct DNA and RNA.…
Category: Planetary Science
NASA’s Perseverance rover captured the sound of a dust devil on Mars
Thanks to a bit of good luck, the Mars rover Perseverance has captured the first-ever sound of a Martian dust devil. The NASA rover has witnessed dusty whirlwinds before. But…
The pristine Winchcombe meteorite suggests that Earth’s water came from asteroids
Late in the evening of February 28, 2021, a coal-dark space rock about the size of a soccer ball fell through the sky over northern England. The rock blazed in…
Marsquakes hint that the planet might be volcanically active after all
Mars might be, geologically speaking, not quite dead. Researchers have analyzed a slew of recent temblors on the Red Planet and shown that these Marsquakes are probably caused by magma…
Ancient bacteria could persist beneath Mars’ surface
Radiation-tolerant microbes might be able to live beneath Mars’ surface for hundreds of millions of years and may yet persist today, thanks in part — counterintuitively — to the Red…
NASA’s DART mission successfully shoved an asteroid
It worked! Humanity has, for the first time, purposely moved a celestial object. As a test of a potential asteroid-deflection scheme, NASA’s DART spacecraft shortened the orbit of asteroid Dimorphos…
Mars’ buried ‘lake’ might just be layers of ice and rock
“Follow the water” has long been the mantra of scientists searching for life beyond Earth. After all, the only known cradle of life in the cosmos is the watery planet…
Robin Wordsworth re-creates the atmosphere of ancient Mars
Visitors to the village of Drumnadrochit, on the western shore of Scotland’s murky Loch Ness, come to see the nearby ruins of Urquhart Castle or to chance a glimpse of…
NASA’s DART spacecraft just smashed into an asteroid — on purpose
Mission control rooms rarely celebrate crash landings. But the collision of NASA’s DART spacecraft with an asteroid was a smashing success. At about 7:15 p.m. EDT on September 26, the…
Here is the first direct look at Neptune’s rings in more than 30 years
Humankind is seeing Neptune’s rings in a whole new light thanks to the James Webb Space Telescope. In an infrared image released September 21, Neptune and its gossamer diadems of…
