Planetary Science News

A fragment of the Hamburg meteorite found on Strawberry Lake near Hamburg, Michigan, the United States. Image credit: Heck et al., doi: 10.1111/maps.13584.

Scientists Find Organic Compounds in Hamburg Meteorite

Oct 28, 2020 by News Staff

An international team of researchers has found extraterrestrial hydrocarbons, sulfurized and nitrogen-containing compounds in the Hamburg meteorite, which...

When the Moon had a magnetic field, it would have been shielded from incoming solar wind, as shown in this illustration. Image credit: NASA.

Moon’s Ancient Magnetosphere May Have Helped Early Earth Retain Its Atmosphere

Oct 15, 2020 by News Staff

Solar storms strip a planet’s atmosphere over time, and only a strong magnetosphere would be able to provide maximum protection. Lunar samples gathered...

Pluto’s Mountains are Capped with Methane Frost: Study

Oct 14, 2020 by News Staff

The bright frosts observed in 2015 in the equatorial region of Cthulhu on Pluto are mostly made of methane-rich ice, according to new research. This image,...

This oblique color view from the HiRISE instrument onboard NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter shows a lithified field of sand dunes within Melas Chasma, Valles Marineris. The large degree of preserved morphology for many of these paleodunes reveals important information regarding the acting wind regime and climate prior to their cementation. Image credit: NASA / JPL / University of Arizona.

One-Billion-Year-Old Sand Dunes Spotted on Mars

Oct 12, 2020 by News Staff

Planetary researchers have mapped and characterized ancient sand dune fields in the canyons of Valles Marineris on Mars. Their discovery offers new insights...

NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft at asteroid Bennu. Image credit: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center.

New Studies Detail Complex History of Near-Earth Asteroid Bennu

Oct 9, 2020 by News Staff

NASA’s OSIRIS-REx (Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security, Regolith Explorer) mission to the near-Earth asteroid Bennu is...

New Study Challenges Hypothesis that Moon’s Crust was Magnetized by Meteoroid Impacts

Oct 8, 2020 by News Staff

The crusts of the Moon, Mercury and many small bodies in the Solar System are magnetized. Although the magnetizing field is commonly attributed to that...

Meteoroids bombarded the Earth-Moon system 800 million years ago. Image credit: Murayama, Osaka University.

Moon May Have Fragments of Ancient Venus on Its Surface

Oct 7, 2020 by News Staff

If the atmosphere of Venus was at any point thin and similar to Earth’s, then ancient asteroid impacts transferred potentially detectable amounts of...

This composite image, taken by JAXA’s Akatsuki spacecraft, shows Venus. Image credit: JAXA / ISAS / DARTS / Damia Bouic.

Migrating Jupiter May Have Made Venus Uninhabitable Long Ago

Sep 30, 2020 by News Staff

Early in the formation of Jupiter as a planet, it moved closer to and then away from the Sun due to interactions with the planetary disk of the young Solar...

An artist’s impression of ESA’s Mars Express spacecraft. Image credit: ESA / ATG Medialab / DLR / FU Berlin / CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO.

Mars Express Finds Three New Water Bodies below Martian South Pole

Sep 28, 2020 by Natali Anderson

Using new radar data from ESA’s Mars Express spacecraft, researchers have detected three reservoirs of liquid water trapped below the south polar cap...

View of the Chang’E 4 lander with the location of the LND sensor head indicated by the red arrow. LND is mounted in the Chang’E 4 payload compartment; the lid at the tip of the red arrow is closed at night to protect LND from the cold lunar night. Image credit: Chinese National Space Agency / National Astronomical Observatories of China.

Scientists Measure Radiation Dose Rates on Lunar Surface

Sep 28, 2020 by Enrico de Lazaro

Using the Lunar Lander Neutrons and Dosimetry (LND) experiment aboard China’s Chang’E 4 lander, a team of researchers from Germany and China has measured...

A simulated view from above Tellus Tessera, one of the regions on Venus where Byrne et al identified the presence of layering. Image credit: NASA.

Venusian Tesserae Feature Layered, Folded and Eroded Rocks

Sep 24, 2020 by News Staff

A significant portion of some of the oldest terrain on Venus, known as tesserae, has striations consistent with layering, according to new research led...

The bright boulders (circled in the images) on the surface of near-Earth asteroid Bennu are pyroxene-rich material from Vesta; some bright material appear to be individual rocks (left) while others appear to be clasts within larger boulders (right). Image credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center / University of Arizona.

OSIRIS-REx Finds Fragments of Minor Planet Vesta on Near-Earth Asteroid Bennu

Sep 22, 2020 by News Staff

In 2019, scientists from the OSIRIS-REx team discovered several unusually bright boulders on the surface of near-Earth asteroid Bennu in images acquired...

In these detailed infrared images of Enceladus, reddish areas indicate fresh ice that has been deposited on the surface. Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / University of Arizona / LPG / CNRS / University of Nantes / Space Science Instituto.

Cassini Finds Fresh Ice in Northern Hemisphere of Enceladus

Sep 21, 2020 by News Staff

Spectral data gathered by the Visual and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer (VIMS) onboard NASA’s Cassini spacecraft provide strong evidence that the northern...

Carbide Planets May Be Made Of Silica and Diamonds

Sep 11, 2020 by News Staff

Extrasolar planets hosted by stars with sufficiently high carbon-to-oxygen ratios could be made of diamonds and silica, according to new research by Arizona...

Hay et al for the first time investigate moon-moon tides in Jupiter’s Galilean moons and show that they can cause significant heating through the excitation of high-frequency resonant tidal waves in their subsurface oceans. Image credit: Galileo Project / Voyager Project / NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Galilean Moons of Jupiter Could Be Warming Each Other

Sep 11, 2020 by News Staff

In a process called tidal heating, gravitational push and pull from Jupiter’s Galilean moons — Europa, Ganymede, Io and Callisto — and the...

Philae at work on the comet. Image credit: ESA / AOES Medialab.

Study: Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko’s Interior is Less Dense than Its Surface

Sep 7, 2020 by News Staff

A new analysis of data gathered by the CONSERT (Comet Nucleus Sounding Experiment by Radio wave Transmission) instrument, a radar onboard ESA’s Rosetta...

Map of hematite (redder color) on the Moon. Image credit: Li et al, doi: 10.1126/sciadv.aba1940.

Mineral Hematite Detected at High Latitudes on Moon

Sep 2, 2020 by News Staff

A ferric mineral called hematite (Fe2O3) is present at high latitudes on the Moon, mostly associated with east- and equator-facing sides of topographic...

This SEM image shows a polished thin section of Asuka 12236. The section is about 1 cm (a third of an inch) across. Most of the bright grains in the image are iron-nickel-metal and/or iron-sulfide. The gray is mostly silicate, with the darker gray areas more magnesium-rich, while the lighter gray areas are more iron-rich. The roundish objects, and some fragments of them, that tend to contain most of the small, bright metal grains are called chondrules, which formed as molten droplets. They are set in a very fine-grained matrix, which is where the organic compounds and presolar grains are found. Image credit: Carnegie Institution for Science / Conel M. O’D. Alexander.

Researchers Find Extraterrestrial Amino Acids in Antarctic Meteorite

Aug 31, 2020 by News Staff

A team of astrobiologists from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and the Carnegie Institution for Science has found a wide diversity of amino acids...

A piece of the enstatite chondrite meteorite Sahara 97096. Image credit: Christine Fieni / Laurette Piani / French National Museum of Natural History.

Earth’s Water Came from Enstatite Chondrite-Like Asteroids, Study Suggests

Aug 28, 2020 by News Staff

A type of meteorite called an enstatite chondrite has similar isotopic composition to terrestrial rocks and thus may be representative of the material...