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 …
Continue reading "Preparing For The Habitable Worlds Observatory, Our Best Shot at Finding ET Life"
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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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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The central and ever-surprising story of water on ancient Mars took a new turn recently when NASA announced that the Perseverance rover had found the fossil remains of a once-powerful river in Jezero Crater. From the nature and patterns of the riverbed turned to stone, to the ways that grains of sand and rocks been …
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"ALL THESE WORLDS ARE YOURS – EXCEPT EUROPA. ATTEMPT NO LANDING THERE." These are the words broadcast by the computer HAL as recounted in Arthur C. Clarke's book "2010: Odyssey Two," the sequel to the iconic "2001: A Space Odyssey." The message had been delivered to the computer by the non-corporeal David Bowman (the focus …
Theories abound on how Earth got its water. Most widely embraced is that asteroids, and maybe comets, crashed into our planet and released the water they held -- in the form of ice or hydrated minerals in their crystal structures -- and over time water became our oceans. The inflow was especially intense during what …
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Science and religion so often seem to be in conflict, with the chasm between them widening all the time. For many, the grounding of their religion is in faith and belief in powers beyond our understanding. For people of science, the grounding is in empirical facts and measurements that can be tested to help explain …
Continue reading "Pam Conrad: The NASA Astrobiologist Who Also Became a Minister"
In 2017, an unusual small object flew into our solar system from afar, approached the inner solar system and the Sun and then sped back out to interstellar space. In all, it was detected and followed for 11 days. The object was puzzling because such interstellar visitors had not been observed before, and most mysterious …
Collecting and transporting back to Earth samples of other planets, moons, asteroids and comets is extremely difficult, costly and time-consuming. But as just-released papers based on Japan's Hayabusa2 sample return mission to the asteroid Ryugu make abundantly clear, the results can be fabulous. In a series of articles in the journal Science, scientists who studied …
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Recent reports about the detection of carbon-based organic molecules on Mars by the instruments of the Perseverance rover included suggestions that some of the organics may well have fallen from space over the eons, and were then preserved on the Martian surface. Given the cruciality of organics as building blocks of life --or even as …
Many Worlds 