After a six-year journey, a plucky spacecraft called Hayabusa2 zinged back into Earth's atmosphere in late 2020 and landed deep in the Australian outback. When researchers from the Japanese space agency JAXA opened it, they ...
Planetary Sciences
Jun 9, 2022
3
762
NASA's Mars helicopter Ingenuity has suffered a sensor failure, according to Håvard Grip, the chief helicopter pilot on the project. In a recent blog post on the NASA Science page, he described some of the challenges the ...
Scientists at the Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution announced today that ribonucleic acid (RNA), an analog of DNA that was likely the first genetic material for life, spontaneously forms on basalt lava glass. Such ...
Astrobiology
Jun 3, 2022
29
19828
A large team of researchers affiliated with multiple institutions in the U.S., Spain, France and Finland has found that frequent dust devils and daytime upslope winds are the reason for Mars's constant atmospheric haze. In ...
Mars once ran red with rivers. The telltale tracks of past rivers, streams and lakes are visible today all over the planet. But about three billion years ago, they all dried up—and no one knows why.
Planetary Sciences
May 26, 2022
8
1768
Billions of years ago, a series of volcanic eruptions broke loose on the moon, blanketing hundreds of thousands of square miles of the orb's surface in hot lava. Over the eons, that lava created the dark blotches, or maria, ...
Space Exploration
May 18, 2022
0
440
A pair of researchers, one with the Carnegie Institution for Science, the other with California Institute of Technology, has developed a possible solution to the Fermi Paradox. In their paper published in Journal of the Royal ...
A team of researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, working with a colleague from the University of Copenhagen, has found evidence that water was present on Mars more recently than has been thought. In their paper published ...
When the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai volcano erupted on Jan. 15, 2022, it sent atmospheric shock waves, sonic booms, and tsunami waves around the world. Now, scientists are finding the volcano's effects also reached space.
Planetary Sciences
May 10, 2022
2
336
A new study using data from NASA's Mars Odyssey orbiter may explain why Martian frost can be invisible to the naked eye and why dust avalanches appear on some slopes.
Planetary Sciences
May 5, 2022
0
153
