Source : Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics NASA”s Kepler space telescope, which is searching for planets transiting across their home stars in one very small segment of the sky has already produced volumes of data and leading to the confirmation of 105 extra solar planets. Now, astronomers using Kepler’s discoveries as a baseline, along with a new […]
Source: JPL Launched in 2005 aboard an Atlas V 401, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has provided a wealth of information regarding the presence of water ice on the Red Planet. In an article (abstract) published Sunday in Nature Geoscience, a team of researchers analyzing data from MRO’s CRISM instrument (Compact Reconnaissance Imaging Spectrometer), which was used to image […]
NASA / JPL recently released Clouds, a new on-line “game” which is a part of the Milky Way Project , a science initiative which seeks to refine some of the vast quantity of observations made by the Spitzer Space telescope and ESA’s Hershel Space Observatory. One of the common emerging themes in space science is that the capacity to […]
There are times when the mystery and wonder gradually being revealed in our own solar system borders on intoxicating, and no deep space probe has done a better job of pealing back the layers than Cassini. It is hard to believe that this mission, launched in 1997 from the same pad now occupied by SpaceX and the Falcon […]
NASA / JPL announced on December 6th the discovery of “long , narrow, sinuous” gullies on the asteroid Vesta. Although no one is claiming at this point that the gullies are clear evidence of water ice, the features bear a remarkable resemblance to similar water carved chasms on Earth and on Mars. The features in question differ markedly from other, short […]
In contrast to the somewhat disappointing press briefing yesterday, especially considering the bizarre and confusing buildup, on mixed findings from the Mars Curiosity Rover, another NASA briefing proved considerably more interesting. It concerned the latest, and presumably some of the last findings to come from the much older, simpler and far more distant Voyager 1 probe as it traverses through what science fiction might call an […]
At first glance, the solar system’s innermost planet generally conjures up images of a blistering hot, sun-baked ball of rock which would be one of the last places one would expect to find water ice. That was considered to be the case until 1991, when the Arecibo radar telescope in Puerto Rico, as well as NASA’s Goldstone/VLA detected reflections from Mercury which appeared to indicate the presence of water ice […]
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, working with the European Space agency’s Herschel Space Observatory has announced the discovery of large concentrations of comets in two solar systems relatively close to our own. With both systems likely to contain rocky planets, the presence of so many water bearing comets, at a concentration 10 times greater than found in our own solar system, […]
Early in the age of exploration under sail, mapmakers sometimes colored in the boundaries of the unknown with the cryptic warning, “here there be dragons.” While the only Dragons seen lately are definitely of the friendly variety, dire warnings of the risks of radiation on Mars have served as a similar precautionary tale for those who would take the first available flight to the Red Planet. […]
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory yesterday released the results of the Mars Curiosity rover’s initial soil sample. The sample, conducted by the Chemistry and Minerology CheMin instrument on the rover, characterized both planetary windblown dust and as well as local material, as similar to basaltic soils found in Hawaii. The predominate minerals recorded so far are feldspar, pyroxene and olivine, with almost half […]
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