NASA's OSIRIS-REx spacecraft mission, launched on Sept. 8, 2016, is the first U.S. mission designed to retrieve a pristine sample of an asteroid and return it to Earth for further study. The mission's target is Bennu, a carbon-rich ...
Space Exploration
Oct 8, 2020
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239
If we ever find life on other worlds, it is unlikely to be a powerful message from space. It's certainly possible that an alien civilization specifically sends us a radio message like a scene out of Contact, but the more ...
Astrobiology
May 4, 2023
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193
In the absence of direct observations of extraterrestrial life, scientists often focus on searching for biosignatures, chemical by-products of life, that can be detected with remote sensing. Although Mars has received the ...
Astrobiology
Dec 2, 2022
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192
Avi Loeb, a physicist from Harvard University in the US, has recovered 50 tiny spherical iron fragments from the bottom of the Pacific Ocean that he claims may be material from an interstellar alien spaceship.
Astrobiology
Jul 10, 2023
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192
Florida Tech astrobiologist Manasvi Lingam has asked life's biggest questions from a young age. Though he can't recall his exact queries, he says his interests were perfectly consistent with those of other children: dinosaurs ...
Astrobiology
Aug 23, 2024
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191
At the center of our galaxy resides the galactic bulge, a densely packed region of stars, dust and gas. Within this massive structure, which spans thousands of light-years, there are an estimated 10 billion stars, most of ...
Astronomy
Jun 9, 2020
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190
How do you make a base on Mars? Simple: you send some bacteria to the red planet and let them mine iron. After a couple of years, you send in human settlers who use the iron to construct a base. That, in a nutshell, is the ...
Space Exploration
Nov 21, 2019
3
217
Finding water on distant planets and moons in our solar system is a challenge, especially when the instrument is thousands of kilometers away from the surface, but scientists presenting at the European Geosciences Union General ...
Astrobiology
Apr 19, 2024
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189
University of Washington astrobiologist Rory Barnes has created software that simulates multiple aspects of planetary evolution across billions of years, with an eye toward finding and studying potentially habitable worlds.
Astronomy
Sep 20, 2019
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189
University of Warwick astronomers have uncovered the chemical fingerprint of a frozen, water-rich planetary fragment being consumed by a white dwarf star outside our solar system.
Astrobiology
Sep 27, 2025
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188
