Planetary Science News

Daly et al. used atom probe tomography to directly observe an average ~1 mol% enrichment in water and hydroxyls in the solar-wind-irradiated rim of an olivine grain from the S-type asteroid Itokawa. Image credit: Curtin University.

Part of Earth’s Water Came from the Sun, New Study Suggests

Nov 29, 2021 by News Staff

The solar wind, comprised of solar particles largely made of hydrogen ions, created water on the surface of dust grains carried on asteroids that smashed...

Curiosity used its navigation cameras to capture panoramas of this scene at two times of day. Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech.

Curiosity Team Releases Stunning Panorama of Martian Landscape

Nov 26, 2021 by News Staff

Members of NASA’s Curiosity rover mission team have combined two versions of the black-and-white images of Martian mountains from different times of...

This artist’s impression shows NASA’s InSight lander in Homestead Hollow, a small impact crater; the r SEIS seismometer is the light-colored hemisphere on the ground in front of the lander; the ground beneath it consists of a sandy regolith layer on top of alternate layers of sediments (yellow-orange colors) and basaltic rocks, i.e. former lava flows (brown colors). Image credit: Géraldine Zenhäusern / ETH Zürich.

Mars Has Multi-Layered Subsurface, New Study Says

Nov 24, 2021 by News Staff

Using seismic data collected by the SEIS (Seismic Experiment for Interior Structure) instrument aboard NASA’s InSight (Interior Exploration using Seismic...

This artist’s illustration shows NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft in the outer Solar System. In the background lies the Sun and a glowing band representing Zodiacal Light, caused by sunlight reflecting off of dust. Image credit: Joe Olmsted / STScI.

New Horizons Detects Galactic Lyman-alpha Emissions

Nov 23, 2021 by News Staff

Hydrogen is the most abundant element. When a neutral hydrogen atom gets blasted with energy, its electron can be boosted to a larger orbit with a higher...

$Organic and inorganic biomorphs (small abiotic structures that bear a morphological resemblance to living or fossil microbes): (a) asteroidal trichites radiating from central magnetite grains in a natural volcanic glass; (b) organic microspheres obtained from RNA and quartz mixtures under diagenetic conditions; (c) amphiphilic spherical and tube-like vesicles formed by mixed fatty acids and 1-alkanols (C10-C15) in 10 mM CaCl2; (d) coacervate microdroplets prepared in water by mixing PDDA with ATP; (e, f ) chain-forming and twinning proteinoid microspheres obtained by heating mixtures of amino acids; (g, h) apatite particles formed by double diffusion in gelatin mimicking dividing cells and raised polygonal features in embryos; (i) rod-shaped silica particles formed on the walls of basalt fractures injected with supercritical CO2; (j) cryogenic opal filaments and sheets formed in rapidly freezing silica-rich fluids; (k) cryogenic carbonate segmented filaments obtained by freezing of silica-rich alkaline brines; (l) rod-shaped apatite particles forming within organic films in sediments; (m) fluoroapatite particle precipitated in the presence of citrate, mimicking dividing coccoid cells. Image credit: McMahon & Cosmidis, doi: 10.1144/jgs2021-050.$

Martian Rocks May Contain Numerous Types of False Biosignatures, Astrobiologists Say

Nov 22, 2021 by News Staff

In a new paper published in the Journal of the Geological Society, University of Edinburgh’s Dr. Sean McMahon and University of Oxford’s Dr. Julie...

This visible-light image of Jupiter was created from data captured on January 11, 2017 using Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3. Near the top, a long brown feature called a ‘brown barge’ extends 72,000 km (nearly 45,000 miles) in the east-west direction. The Great Red Spot stands out prominently in the lower left, while the smaller feature nicknamed Red Spot Jr. (known to Jovian scientists as Oval BA) appears to its lower right. Image credit: NASA / ESA / NOIRLab / NSF / AURA / Wong et al. / de Pater et al. / M. Zamani.

Juno Provides New Information about Jupiter’s Enigmatic Atmospheric Features

Nov 1, 2021 by News Staff

Juno launched on August 5, 2011 and successfully entered Jupiter’s orbit on July 4, 2016. During each of the spacecraft’s 37 passes of Jupiter to date,...

This artistic conception illustrates large asteroids penetrating Earth’s oxygen-poor atmosphere. Image credit: SwRI / Dan Durda / Simone Marchi.

Archean Asteroid Impacts Delayed Evolution of Earth’s Atmosphere, Study Suggests

Oct 21, 2021 by News Staff

A team of researchers from the United States and Austria has analyzed remnants of ancient asteroids and modeled the effects of their violent collisions...

This artist’s concept depicts NASA’s Mars rover Perseverance on the surface of the Red Planet. Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech.

NASA’s Perseverance Rover Records Martian Sounds

Oct 20, 2021 by News Staff

NASA’s Perseverance rover carries two microphones which are directly recording sounds on Mars, including wind gusts, rover wheels crunching over gravel,...

This is an artist impression of the protoplanetary disk around HD 107146. Image credit: A. Angelich / NRAO / AUI / NSF.

Mysterious Gap Existed within Solar System’s Protoplanetary Disk, New Research Suggests

Oct 20, 2021 by News Staff

Around 4.567 billion years ago, our Solar System harbored a gap within the protoplanetary disk, near the location where the main asteroid belt resides...

An artist’s rendering of the surface of Saturn’s largest moon, Titan. Image credit: Benjamin de Bivort, debivort.org / CC BY-SA 3.0.

Scientists Create Maps of Titan’s Hydrocarbon Rivers and Tributaries

Oct 19, 2021 by News Staff

Planetary researchers have mapped all observable fluvial features on Saturn’s hazy moon Titan — excluding those in the highly incised labyrinth...

An artist’s impression of the early Venus. Image credit: Manchu.

Venus Never Had Oceans, New Study Suggests

Oct 18, 2021 by News Staff

New research led by the Observatoire astronomique de l’Université de Genève suggests that water never condensed and that, consequently, oceans never...

This illustration shows NASA’s Lucy spacecraft passing one of the Trojan asteroids near Jupiter. Image credit: Southwest Research Institute.

NASA’s Lucy Spacecraft Launches to Study Jupiter’s Trojan Asteroids

Oct 18, 2021 by News Staff

NASA’s Lucy spacecraft was launched on October 16, 2021, at 5:34 a.m. EDT aboard a United Launch Alliance (ULA) Atlas V rocket out of Space Launch Complex...

Palmerini et al. analyzed the isotopic composition of heavy neutron capture elements measured in SiC stardust grains extracted from pristine meteorites, interpreting them as the outcome of s-process nucleosynthesis occurring in the AGB stages of stars with masses between two and three solar masses and solar metallicities. Image credit: Nan Liu / Andrew Davis / NASA.

Researchers Measure Isotopic Ratios in Presolar Stardust Grains

Oct 12, 2021 by News Staff

An international team of scientists has analyzed a diverse set of presolar grains with the goal of realizing their true stellar origins. Palmerini et al....

Perseverance Finds Ancient Delta-Lake System, Flood Deposits in Martian Jezero Crater

Oct 8, 2021 by News Staff

Planetary scientists have analyzed images taken by the Mastcam-Z camera and the Remote Micro-Imager of the SuperCam instrument on NASA’s Perseverance...

This mosaic image of asteroid Bennu is composed of 12 images collected on December 2, 2018 by OSIRIS-REx’s PolyCam instrument from a range of 15 miles (24 km). Image credit: NASA / NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center / University of Arizona.

Asteroids with Highly Porous Rocks Lack Fine-Grain Regolith: Study

Oct 7, 2021 by News Staff

Planetary researchers have discovered an inverse correlation between the local abundance of fine-grain material and the porosity of rocks on the carbonaceous...

Pluto’s haze layer shows its blue color in this picture taken by the New Horizons Ralph/Multispectral Visible Imaging Camera (MVIC). The high-altitude haze is thought to be similar in nature to that seen at Saturn’s moon Titan. The source of both hazes likely involves sunlight-initiated chemical reactions of nitrogen and methane, leading to relatively small, soot-like particles -- called tholins -- that grow as they settle toward the surface. This image was generated by software that combines information from blue, red and near-infrared images to replicate the color a human eye would perceive as closely as possible. Image credit: NASA / Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory / Southwest Research Institute.

Pluto’s Nitrogen Atmosphere is Condensing as Dwarf Planet Moves Away from Sun

Oct 5, 2021 by News Staff

The surface pressure on the dwarf planet Pluto is decreasing and that its nitrogen atmosphere is condensing, forming ice on the dwarf planet’s surface,...

Valley networks and paleolake outlet canyons on Mars: (a) distribution of analyzed valley networks (black) and paleolake outlet canyons (white); gray shading indicates the combined latitude (poleward of ±30°) and age (younger than Early Hesperian) mask used for volume calculations; (b and c) examples of the early Martian landscape dissected by both valley networks (black) and paleolake outlet canyons (white); paleolake basin extents shown by semi-transparent white polygons. Image credit: Goudge et al., doi: 10.1038/s41586-021-03860-1.

Lake Breach Floods Eroded Surface of Early Mars, Study Says

Sep 30, 2021 by News Staff

Massive floods from overflowing crater lakes were responsible for eroding at least 24% of the volume of incised valleys on early Mars, according to new...

Hydrogen atoms diffuse easily between the superionic and the liquid phases. The liquid-fcc superionic interface of a water system with 20,736 atoms at 100 GPa and 3,250 K (on the melting curve) is shown. The oxygen atoms are red and the hydrogen atoms are white. The yellow, green and blue lines show the trajectories of three hydrogen atoms during a 75 ps molecular dynamics simulation run. Image credit: Cheng et al., doi: 10.1038/s41567-021-01334-9.

Physicists Study Superionic Water’s Phase Behaviors

Sep 28, 2021 by News Staff

Using machine learning, a team of physicists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has studied the phase behaviors of superionic water — a phase...

An artist’s impression of the InSight lander on Mars. Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech.

InSight Detects Three Strong Marsquakes

Sep 23, 2021 by News Staff

On September 18, 2021, NASA’s InSight lander celebrated its 1,000th Martian day by measuring one of the biggest, longest-lasting marsquakes its has ever...

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