A fresh, icy crust hides a deep, enigmatic ocean. Plumes of water burst through cracks in the ice, shooting into space. An intrepid lander collects samples and analyzes them for hints of life.
In the next decade, space agencies will expand the search for extraterrestrial life beyond Mars, where all of our astrobiology efforts are currently focused. This includes the ESA's JUpiter ICy moon's Explorer (JUICE) and ...
Jupiter's icy moon Europa has long been thought of as one of the most habitable worlds in the Solar System. Now the Juno mission to Jupiter has directly sampled its atmosphere in detail for the first time. The results, published ...
A study led by Western astrobiologist Catherine Neish shows the subsurface ocean of Titan—the largest moon of Saturn—is most likely a non-habitable environment, meaning any hope of finding life in the icy world is dead ...
A recent study accepted to The Planetary Science Journal and currently posted to the arXiv preprint server investigates how the organic hazes that existed on Earth between the planet's initial formation and 500 million years ...
Titan's "magic islands" are likely floating chunks of porous, frozen organic solids, a new study finds, pivoting from previous work suggesting they were gas bubbles. The study was published in Geophysical Research Letters.
Though Saturn's unusual-looking "cup handle" features were first noted by Galileo in 1610, it would be another 45 years before they were described by Christiaan Huygens as a disk surrounding Saturn. Subsequently, ground-based ...
Saturn's rings are one of the jewels of the solar system, but it seems that their time is short and their existence fleeting.
When NASA's 990-pound Dragonfly rotorcraft reaches the Selk crater region—the mission's target touchdown spot—on Saturn's moon Titan in 2034, Cornell's Léa Bonnefoy will have helped to make it a smooth landing.
In 2006, the Cassini spacecraft recorded geyser curtains shooting forth from "tiger stripe" fissures near the south pole of Saturn's moon Enceladus—sometimes as much as 200 kilograms of water per second. A new study suggests ...
