A trio of researchers at Purdue University has developed a new theory to explain why Pluto's moon Charon has a reddish north pole. In their paper published in the journal Nature Communications, Stephanie Menten, Michael Sori ...
A group of researchers has succeeded in converting methane into methanol using light and dispersed transition metals such as copper in a process known as photo-oxidation. According to an article reporting the study published ...
Materials Science
Aug 2, 2022
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UNSW chemists have engineered a new molecular "vice," by including the rare metal osmium, that can bind methane for hours—providing crucial evidence for an intermediate step that will inform new catalysts to store, transport, ...
Materials Science
Jun 29, 2022
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NASA's Curiosity rover landed on Mars in August 2012, and its investigations revealed that Mars was once a potentially habitable planet. One of Curiosity's most exciting observations has been periodic, unusually high abundances ...
Space Exploration
Jan 14, 2022
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145
Researchers at the University of Illinois Chicago have discovered a way to convert the methane in natural gas into liquid methanol at room temperature.
Materials Science
Feb 19, 2021
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Elizabeth Turtle was overjoyed when, on June 26, she received a call from NASA: her project to send a drone quadcopter to Titan, Saturn's largest moon, was given the green light, which came with a budget of nearly a billion ...
Space Exploration
Jul 4, 2019
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During NASA's Cassini mission's final distant encounter with Saturn's giant moon Titan, the spacecraft captured the enigmatic moon's north polar landscape of lakes and seas, which are filled with liquid methane and ethane.
Space Exploration
Sep 13, 2018
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134
The presence of water on ancient Mars is a paradox. There's plenty of geographical evidence that rivers periodically flowed across the planet's surface. Yet in the time period when these waters are supposed to have run—three ...
Space Exploration
Jan 24, 2017
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607
Titan is a mysterious orange-socked moon of Saturn that is exciting to astrobiologists because it has some of the same kinds of chemicals that were precursors to life on Earth. It also has a hydrological cycle that allows ...
Space Exploration
Jun 30, 2015
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63
A decade ago, a tiny but mighty probe descended into the soupy atmosphere of Titan. This moon of Saturn is of great interest to astrobiologists because its chemistry and liquid cycle remind us of what the early Earth could ...
Space Exploration
Mar 5, 2015
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