Planetary Science News

Detecting Extraterrestrial Life on Enceladus Could Be Achieved without Landing: Study

An artist’s impression of NASA’s Cassini spacecraft flying through plumes erupting from the south pole of Enceladus; these plumes are much like geysers and expel a combination of water vapor, ice grains, salts, methane and other organic molecules. Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech.
Jan 2, 2023 by News Staff

Enceladus, the sixth-biggest moon of Saturn, is a top candidate in the search for extraterrestrial life in the Solar System. An artist’s impression of NASA’s Cassini spacecraft flying through plumes erupting from the south pole of Enceladus; these plumes are much like geysers and expel a combination of water vapor, ice grains, salts, methane and other organic molecules. Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech. In 2014, NASA’s Cassini spacecraft discovered...

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The volcano-laced surface of Jupiter’s moon Io was captured in infrared by the Jovian Infrared Auroral Mapper (JIRAM) imager aboard NASA’s Juno spacecraft as it flew by at a distance of was about 80,000 km (50,000 miles) on July 5, 2022. Brighter spots indicate higher temperatures in this image. Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / SwRI / ASI / INAF / JIRAM.

Trace Gas Detection Sheds New Light on Atmospheres of Jupiter and Its Volcanic Moon Io

Dec 28, 2022 by Natali Anderson

Using data from NSF’s Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA), the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) and NASA’s Juno spacecraft, two...

This beautifully scene was captured by the High Resolution Stereo Camera on ESA’s Mars Express on May 19, 2022 during orbit 23219. Image credit: ESA / DLR / FU Berlin / CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO.

Mars Express Spots Two Large Craters at Martian South Pole

Dec 23, 2022 by News Staff

A new image from the High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) on board ESA’s Mars Express orbiter shows an exciting landscape of layered deposits, frost,...

Perseverance’s Navigation Camera (Navcam) observations of the direct dust devil encounter: the Navcam scene (the average background image, top panel) and each dust devil image processed to dust amount (five lower panels), masking out only the truly indeterminate areas (gray); the color scale ranges from optical depth, τ = 0 at the bottom (blue) to τ = 0.12 at the top (yellow), and is linear in between; the areas with low signal-to-noise ratio are masked out, and the images also show non-random noise (banding from instrument electronics during readout); the grid on the scene image (top panel) is 5  degrees in local level azimuth and elevation; the darker gray contours are elevation=0 degrees and azimuth=165 degrees. Image credit: Murdoch et al., doi: 10.1038/s41467-022-35100-z.

NASA’s Perseverance Rover Records Sound of Martian Dust Devil

Dec 13, 2022 by News Staff

Dust devils — convective vortices loaded with dust — are common at the surface of Mars, particularly at Jezero crater, the landing site of...

An artist’s impression of an active mantle plume -- a large blob of warm and buoyant rock -- rising from deep inside Mars and pushing up Elysium Planitia, a plain within the planet’s northern lowlands. Image credit: Adrien Broquet & Audrey Lasbordes.

Planetary Scientists Find Evidence for Active Mantle Plume on Mars

Dec 6, 2022 by News Staff

Elysium Planitia, a flat-smooth plain just north of the Martian equator, is underlain by an 4,000-km-diameter active mantle plume, according to new research...

An illustration of an asteroid on its way to ancient Mars. Image credit: M. Kornmesser / ESO / Nathan Owen-Price / Sci.News.

Chicxulub-Like Asteroid Caused Megatsunami on Early Mars

Dec 1, 2022 by News Staff

The Chicxulub-like asteroid crash landed in shallow ocean waters in the Martian region of Chryse Planitia 3.4 billion years ago (Hesperian period) and...

The young Mars would have had enough water to cover its entire surface in a liquid layer about 140 m deep, but it is more likely that the liquid would have pooled to form an ocean occupying almost half of Mars’s northern hemisphere, and in some regions reaching depths greater than 1.6 km. Image credit: M. Kornmesser / ESO / N. Risinger, skysurvey.org.

Early Martian Ocean Was Over 300 Meters Deep, New Research Suggests

Nov 18, 2022 by News Staff

An analysis of chromium isotopes in Martian meteorites suggests that approximately 4.5 billion years ago, there was enough water for the entire planet...

A spiral-shaped dust storm is visible in this image taken by the High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) imager on ESA’s Mars Express spacecraft. This image, taken on May 26, 2019, depicts the formation of a spiral shape whose main arm is approximately 2,000 km in length. A granular pattern of dust cells is visible in the storm, formed by a process called closed-cell convection. This type of convection is also responsible for some cloud patterns on Earth. Image credit: ESA / DLR / FU Berlin.

Martian Springtime Dust Storms Churn Up Surprisingly Earth-Like Cloud Patterns: Study

Nov 16, 2022 by News Staff

Using images obtained by two orbiting spacecraft, NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and ESA’s Mars Express, planetary researchers analyzed textured...

Bonsor et al. present distinct observational evidence from white dwarf planetary systems for planetesimal formation occurring during the first few hundred thousand years after cloud collapse in exoplanetary systems. Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech.

Stars and Building Blocks of Their Planets ‘Grow Up’ Together, New Study Suggests

Nov 15, 2022 by News Staff

The timing and locations of formation of planetesimals — the building blocks of planets — are crucial to the understanding of planet formation....

This image, taken by Mars Express’ High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) on April 5, 2022, shows the Terra Sirenum region on Mars. Image credit: ESA / DLR / FU Berlin / CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO.

Mars Express Sees Craters and Fractures in Terra Sirenum

Oct 31, 2022 by News Staff

This new image from the High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) aboard ESA’s Mars Express orbiter shows a diverse region southeast of the Pickering crater...

Boulder-size blocks of water ice can be seen around the rim of an impact crater in the Amazonis Planitia regionon Mars, as viewed by the High-Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) aboard NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / University of Arizona.

Meteoroid Impact on Mars Excavated Large Chunks of Water Ice, Planetary Scientists Say

Oct 28, 2022 by News Staff

On December 24, 2021, NASA’s InSight lander recorded a magnitude 4 marsquake with a distinct signature rippling across the surface of Mars. In a pair...

Benjamin Cardenas & Michael Lamb show definitive evidence of a roughly 3.5-billion-year-old shoreline with substantial sedimentary accumulation, at least 900 m thick, that covered hundreds of thousands of square kilometers. Image credit: Benjamin Cardenas / Penn State.

New Evidence for Northern Ocean on Early Mars

Oct 28, 2022 by News Staff

A major question in Mars history is whether the planet had an ocean in its northern hemisphere. New research provides evidence for a northern ocean or...

This artist’s impression shows how Mars may have looked about 4 billion years ago. Image credit: M. Kornmesser / ESO.

Chances of Finding Ancient Bacteria on Mars are Better than Previously Expected: Study

Oct 27, 2022 by Natali Anderson

Radiation resistance of microbes is a key parameter in considering survivability of microbes over geologic times on the frigid, arid surface of Mars that...

NASA’s Cassini spacecraft in orbit around Saturn. Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech.

Cassini Sheds New Light on Saturn’s Rings

Oct 19, 2022 by News Staff

The Ultraviolet Imaging Spectrograph instrument onboard NASA’s Cassini spacecraft observed 41 solar occultations by Saturn’s rings. Now, planetary...

Review of the mechanisms proposed in the literature to explain the emplacement of liquid reservoirs invoked to correspond to a variety of geological features at Europa’s surface. Image credit: Lesage et al., doi: 10.3847/PSJ/ac75bf.

Shallow Lakes in Europa’s Crust Could Erupt, Planetary Scientists Say

Oct 13, 2022 by News Staff

In the search for life beyond Earth, subsurface bodies of water in the outer Solar System are some of the most important targets. That’s why NASA and...

The young Mars would have had enough water to cover its entire surface in a liquid layer about 140 m deep, but it is more likely that the liquid would have pooled to form an ocean occupying almost half of Mars’s northern hemisphere, and in some regions reaching depths greater than 1.6 km. Image credit: M. Kornmesser / ESO / N. Risinger, skysurvey.org.

Mars was Habitable for Methanogenic Microorganisms 3.7 Billion Years Ago, Study Suggests

Oct 10, 2022 by News Staff

The subsurface of Mars during the Noachian period was likely to have been habitable for microorganisms that feed on hydrogen and produce methane, according...

These images shows Jupiter’s icy moons Ganymede and Europa with Jupiter in the background. Image credit: ESO / King & Fletcher / NASA / ESA / A. Simon, NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center / M.H. Wong, University of California, Berkeley / OPAL Team.

SPHERE Helps Determine Surface Compositions of Europa and Ganymede

Oct 10, 2022 by Natali Anderson

Astronomers using the Spectro-Polarimetric High-contrast Exoplanet REsearch (SPHERE) instrument on ESO’s Very Large Telescope have imaged Jupiter’s...

This look at the complex, ice-covered surface of Europa came from Juno during a close pass on September 29, 2022. The spacecraft had only a two-hour window to collect it, racing past the moon with a relative velocity of about 23.6 km per second (14.7 miles per second). Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / SWRI / MSSS.

Juno Flyby Reveals Stunning New Image of Europa

Sep 30, 2022 by News Staff

This new image of Jupiter’s moon Europa, captured during NASA’s Juno spacecraft’s closest approach on September 29, 2022, shows a region near the...

A panning-view of Jupiter’s upper atmospheric temperatures, 1,000 km (621 miles) above the cloud tops; the auroral region (near the northern pole, in yellow/white) appears to have shed a massive, planetary-scale wave of heating towards the equator. Image credit: NASA / ESA / Hubble / A. Simon / NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center / J. Schmidt / O’Donoghue et al., doi: 10.5194/epsc2022-373.

Huge Heat Wave Spotted in Upper Atmosphere of Jupiter

Sep 23, 2022 by News Staff

The high-temperature planetary-scale-sized structure is at least 130,000 km (80,778 miles) long, according to a new study led by JAXA scientists. A panning-view...

This image of the asteroid Ryugu was captured by the Optical Navigation Camera - Telescopic (ONC-T) on JAXA’s Hayabusa-2 spacecraft on June 26, 2018, from a distance of 13.7 miles (22 km). Image credit: JAXA / University of Tokyo / Kochi University / Rikkyo University / Nagoya University / Chiba Institute of Technology / Meiji University / Aizu University / AIST.

Asteroid Ryugu’s Parent Body Formed in Outer Solar System, New Analysis Suggests

Sep 23, 2022 by News Staff

Samples of the near-Earth asteroid (162173) Ryugu were brought to Earth by JAXA’s Hayabusa-2 spacecraft. This image of the asteroid Ryugu was captured...

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