I had the pleasure of reporting and writing the Many Worlds column -- sponsored by NASA's NExSS initiative and the Lunar & Planetary Institute -- for more than seven years, but the run came to an end in October. Now an archive of the more than 400 columns is easily available at http://www.manyworlds.space. The stories …
Preparing For The Habitable Worlds Observatory, Our Best Shot at Finding ET Life
In a solar system far, far away, life of some sort is just waiting to be found. Or so the world of astrobiology sure hopes it is. The new player in the astrobiology world, now called the Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO), is planned to launch in the 2040s if all goes well. While it's possible …
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A Real ET Discovery With Promise, Amid Some Other Quite Questionable Claims
Beware easy answers to the question of whether life exists beyond Earth. Be they "alien" skeletons in Mexico City, interstellar probes that briefly pass through our solar system, UFOs of all sorts and claims to have found "biosignature" chemical byproducts of life around planets where many other factors say that life cannot exist -- their …
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After Seven Years Away Exploring an Asteroid, OSIRIS-REx is Landing Soon with Precious Samples
Bits of pebbles and dust from the asteriod Bennu that were collected during the long journey of the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft should be landing in the Utah desert later this month. The delivery will be a first for NASA -- its first sample return from an asteroid and one of a very small handful of space …
The Moon Rush Is On. Are We on Earth Ready For That?
An Indian spacecraft landed on the moon this month and a pioneering Japanese lunar lander is awaiting an imminent launch. A Russian craft trying to land in the same area -- the southern polar region -- recently crashed, as did a private effort by a joint Japanese-United Arab Emirates group and one by several Israeli …
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Getting To Know Rogue Planets
In our Earthling minds, planets exist in solar systems with a Sun in the middle and objects large and small orbiting around it. This is hardly surprising since planets are pretty much exclusively illustrated in solar systems and, until the onset of the 21st century, no other kind of planet had been identified. That changed …
The Evolving Science of Technosignatures
The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) began decades ago as an effort to pick up radio signals from distant civilizations. The effort was centered at the Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia and was by today's standards quite rudimentary. A much broader search for distant radio signals remains very much at the core of SETI …
The Familiar, Yet So Different, Hydrocarbon Rivers of Titan
There are three planets or moons in our solar system known to now have, or once had, surface rivers, lakes, deltas and a hydrologic system. There's Earth, of course, Mars long ago when it was warmer and wetter, and the so different yet so similar rivers of hydrocarbons on Saturn's moon, Titan. Understanding the dynamics …
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Webb Telescope Finds No Signs of a Thick Atmosphere Around a Second TRAPPIST-1 Planet
Among the most eagerly awaited results from the early observations of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is whether or not the seven rocky planets of the TRAPPIST-1 system have atmospheres. The TRAPPIST-1 planets are close to us (40 light-years away), are all solid rather than gaseous, and they orbit a cool and small sun …
All Six Element Needed For Life as We Know It Have Now Been Found in The Watery Plumes of Enceladus
The elements needed for life as we know it are carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen sulfur and phosphorus. Before today, planetary scientists could say that five of those crucial elements had been found in the watery spray that spurts out of the Saturn's moon, Enceladus. All that was missing was phosphorus. But today research presented in …
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