INFORMATION

We do not yet know how, where, or why life first appeared on our planet. Part of the difficulty is that “life” has no strict, universally agreed-upon definition. Normally this is not an issue, as the vast majority of life is most definitely alive, and only biologists interested in the extreme edges – viruses, prions, and the like – need to worry about precise classifications. But to study the origins of life we must, by necessity, examine a process that takes non-living matter and fundamentally changes it. Presumably this process happened in stages, with fits and starts along the way, and so the line between uncoordinated chemical reactions and the beginnings of vibrancy must be blurred. It’s helpful here to present at least a simple working definition of life, not to rewrite the biology textbooks, but so that at least we can properly frame the discussion of life’s origins. And for those purposes a simple statement will suffice: life is that which is subject to Darwinian evolution....

The James Webb Space Telescope , a collaborative effort between NASA, the ESA, and the Canadian Space Agency (CSA), has revealed some stunning new images of the Universe. These images have not only been the clearest and most details views of the cosmos; they’ve also led to new insight into cosmological phenomena. The latest image, acquired by Webb ‘s Mid-InfraRed Instrument (MIRI), is of the star-forming nebula N79 , located about 160,000 light-years away in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC). The image features a bright young star and the nebula’s glowing clouds of dust and gas from which new stars form. The image above is centered on one of the three giant molecular cloud complexes – dubbed N79 South (S1) – a region dominated by interstellar atomic hydrogen that is ionized. The star is identifiable as the brightest spot in the image, surrounded by six large spokes of light that cross the image. The processed image uses many different colors to indicate different infrared wavelengths...

Our planet sits in the Habitable Zone of our Sun, the special place where water can be liquid on the surface of a world. But that’s not the only thing special about us: we also sit in the Galactic Habitable Zone, the region within the Milky Way where the rate of star formation is just right. The Earth was born with all the ingredients necessary for life – something that most other planets lack. Water as a solvent. Carbon, with its ability to form long chains and bind to many other atoms, a scaffold. Oxygen, easily radicalized and transformable from element to element, to provide the chain reactions necessary to store and harvest energy. And more: hydrogen, phosphorous, nitrogen. Some elements fused in the hearts of stars, other only created in more violent processes like the deaths of the most massive stars or the collisions of exotic white dwarfs. And with that, a steady, long-lived Sun, free of the overwhelming solar flares that could drown the system in deadly radiation, providin...

We live in an age of renewed space exploration, colloquially known as Space Age 2.0. Unlike the previous one, this new space age is characterized by inter-agency cooperation and collaboration between space agencies and the commercial space industry (aka. NewSpace). In addition to sending crews back to the Moon and onto Mars, a major objective of the current space age is the commercialization of Low Earth Orbit (LEO). That means large constellations of satellites, debris mitigation, and plenty of commercial space stations. To accommodate this commercial presence in LEO, Sierra Space has developed the Large Integrated Flexible Environment (LIFE) habitat, an inflatable module that can be integrated into future space stations. As part of the Commercial Low Earth Orbit Development Program , NASA, Sierra Space, and ILC Dover (the Delaware-based engineering manufacturing company) recently conducted a full-scale burst pressure test of their LIFE habitat. The test occurred at NASA’s Marshall ...

Although our Moon formed 4.5 billion years ago, it’s still evolving. The interior continues to cool and its orbit is slowly changing. As a result, the Moon has lost 150 feet of its circumference. That shrinkage contributes to near-constant moonquakes , and those trigger landslides and other surface changes. The Moon is currently uninhabited, but all that activity threatens future Artemis landing sites and missions at the South Pole. In a recent paper, planetary scientists point out that the potential of strong seismic events from active thrust faults should be a top consideration when NASA and other agencies are planning permanent outposts on the Moon. This is particularly true as the Artemis mission planners plot exploration of the South Pole. “Our modeling suggests that shallow moonquakes capable of producing strong ground shaking in the south polar region are possible from slip events on existing faults or the formation of new thrust faults,” said the study’s lead author Thomas R....

What were you doing last Saturday? As it turns out, I was doing something rather unexciting… Trying to fix my washing machine (I did – in case you are interested). At the same time, Hungarian geography teacher by day and asteroid hunter by night Krisztián Sárneczky was out observing and detected a small asteroid which it transpired was on a collision course with Earth!  Spotting asteroids is a tricky business. Not least because they are typically dark in colour against a very black sky but the sky is quite a big place and spotting a tiny dark object against a massive black sky is worse than looking for a needle in a haystack! Unperturbed by the statistics and likelihood of actually discovering one, Sárneczky regularly scours the sky looking for asteroids and supernova at the Konkoly observatory in Budapest, Hungary.  He was engaged in this very task last Saturday night (20th January) at 22:48 CET (21:48 UT) when he spotted a new asteroid using a 0.6m Schmidt Telescope. Any ...

Now we know why Japan’s lunar lander wasn’t able to recharge its batteries after touching down on the moon last week : The spacecraft appears to have tumbled onto its side, with its solar cells facing away from the sun. The good news is that the Smart Lander for Investigating Moon , or SLIM, achieved its primary mission of setting down within 100 meters (330 feet) of its target point — and that the mission’s two mini-probes, which were ejected during SLIM’s descent, are working as intended. Scores of images were taken before and after landing. One of the pictures. captured by a camera on the ball-shaped LEV-2 mini-probe, shows the lander sitting at an odd angle with its thrusters facing upward and its solar cells facing westward. To conserve battery power, mission managers at the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency shut down SLIM after the probes transmitted the imagery they collected. But there’s still a chance that the sun’s shifting rays could provide enough power to allow for fur...