INFORMATION

Mars might not be the first place you would think of when thinking about where wind power might be useful. It has dust storms similar in scale to anything that the Earth can muster, and they’ve been responsible for the death of lots of the technology we’ve sent to the Red planet over the years. However, the strength of those storms is only enough to lift some dust particles into the air, which eventually shrouds that technology’s solar panels. Scientists have thought that it doesn’t really have enough oomph to be useful for anything. However, a new paper calls that assumption into question and shows that wind power could be useful on Mars. There are a few caveats in that statement, though. One is that this research is based on climate models rather than actual wind data at many locations. Another is that it would potentially only be helpful in particular locations, though those locations are some of the more scientifically exciting locales anyway. Scientific interest is one of the m...

There’s an old adage in the engineering field – what gets funded gets built. So it’s sure to be a happy time over at the Planetary Society, as NEO Surveyor, the project the organization has primarily supported over the past few years, has made it through NASA’s grueling budgetary process to reach the “development” stage, with an eye for a launch of the system in 2028. NEO Surveyor is, as the name implies, a satellite specifically designed to survey for objects near the Earth (NEO). One of its primary contributions will be to look for asteroids and other small bodies that are potentially on an eventual collision course with Earth but are invisible to typical NEO survey missions because of their location in the solar system.  Typically, their signals are just background noise against the overwhelming signal from the Sun. But NEO Surveyor will be able to detect individual asteroid heat signatures, allowing it to isolate potentially dangerous asteroids using this novel technique. Wi...

Inspiration for space exploration can come from all corners. One of the most inspiring, or terrifying, sources of inspiration for some in space exploration came from computer science expert John von Neumann, who laid out a framework for self-replicating machines in a series of lectures he gave in 1948. Ever since then, scientists and engineers have been debating the advantages, and the perils, of such a system. However, while technology has indeed advanced a long way since the 1940s, it still seems like we are still a long way from having a fully functional von Neumann machine. That is unless you turn to biology. Even simple biological systems can perform absolutely mind-blowing feats of chemical synthesis. And there are few people in the world today who know that better than George Church. The geneticist from Harvard has been at the forefront of a revolution in the biological sciences over the last 30 years. Now, he’s published a new paper in Astrobiology musing about how biology cou...

Over seven years ago, the New Horizons mission made history when it became the first spacecraft to conduct a flyby of Pluto . In the leadup to this encounter, the spacecraft provided updated data and images of many objects in the inner and outer Solar System. Once beyond the orbit of Pluto and its moons, it embarked on a new mission: to make the first encounter with a Kuiper Belt Object (KBO). This historic flyby occurred about four years ago ( Dec. 31st, 2015 ) when New Horizons zipped past Arrokoth (aka. 2014 MU69). Now that it is passing through the Kuiper Belt, away from the light pollution of the inner Solar System, it has another lucrative mission: measuring the brightness of the Universe. These measurements will allow astronomers to make more accurate estimates of how many galaxies there are, which is still the subject of debate. According to new measurements by New Horizons , the light coming from stars beyond the Milky Way is two to three times brighter than the light from...

In the not-too-distant future, a planetary scientist will open up a tube of rocks that came from Mars. Thanks to the Perseverance rover, there are at least 17 of these rock and regolith samples, just waiting for analysis on Earth. To get them, the rover has covered about 13 kilometers on its Mars geology field trip. The rover has been drilling and scooping since shortly after landing, squirreling away rocks and sand into special tubes for transport. It dropped its first load near a place called “Three Forks” this week. That tube contains bits of igneous rock it found in January of this year. It wasn’t just a “drop and run”. Mission engineers had to make sure the tube landed safely. So, they did it slowly. First, Perseverance pulled the container out of its belly. Then it looked everything over with a camera before dropping the tube down 90 centimeters onto the surface. Then another image showed mission engineers the sample was safely in position on its side for easy pickup. Eventua...

On September 26th, NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft collided with Dimorphos, the small moonlet that orbits the larger Near-Earth Asteroid (NEA) Didymos. The purpose was to test a planetary defense technique known as the kinetic impact method, where a spacecraft intentionally colludes with a Potentially Hazardous Asteroid (PHAs) to alter its course. Based on a post-collision analysis, NASA determined that DART’s impact altered Dimorphos’ orbital period by 33 minutes and caused tons of rock to be ejected from its surface. Since the collision, NASA has also been monitoring the cloud of ejecta produced by the impact to see how it has since evolved. The purpose of this is to better understand what the DART spacecraft achieved at the impact site, how much of it was delivered by the spacecraft, and how much was due to the recoil produced by the ejection. On December 15th , during the Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) in Chicago, members of the DA...

Here’s a thorny problem: What if life doesn’t always appear on planets that can support it? What if we find more and more exoplanets and determine that some of them are habitable? What if we also determine that life hasn’t appeared on them yet? Could we send life-bringing comets to those planets and seed them with terrestrial life? And if we could do that, should we? This is the question that a new research article in the journal Astrobiology explores. The paper is “ Directed Panspermia Using Interstellar Comets. ” The authors are Christopher P. McKay, Paul C.W. Davies, and Simon P. Worden. They’re from NASA’s Ames Research Center, the Beyond Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science at Arizona State University, and Breakthrough Initiatives, respectively. The idea that life spreads throughout the Universe is called panspermia. (Ancient Greek: pan meaning all and sperma meaning seed.) It’s not a new idea. The Greek philosopher Anaxagoras first proposed it back in the 5th century ...

The powerful James Webb Space Telescope is a mighty technological tool. Astrophysicists first conceived it over 20 years ago, and after many twists and turns, it was launched on December 2st, 2021. Now it’s in a halo orbit at the Sun-Earth L2 point , where it will hopefully continue operating for 20 years. It’s only been a few months since its first images were released, and it’s already making progress in answering some of the Universe’s most compelling questions. In a newly-released image, the JWST peered deep inside massive clouds of gas and dust to watch young stars come to life in their stellar cocoons. One of the JWST’s first images was of the “Cosmic Cliffs.” The Cosmic Cliffs are the edge of an active star-forming region in NGC 3324, a star cluster near the Carina Nebula. The image shows the intense ultraviolet energy from hot young stars that shape the region, carving out cavernous gaps and leaving towers of gas that resist the radiation. We all marvelled at that image bac...