Tag Archive for 'Planet'

This image from the Context Camera onboard NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter shows Bosporos Planum on Mars; the white specks are salt deposits found within a dry channel; the largest impact crater in the scene is nearly 1.5 km (one mile) across. Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / MSSS.

Water Flowed on Martian Surface as Recently as Two Billion Years Ago, Study Suggests

Jan 27, 2022 by News Staff

It’s commonly believed that Martian liquid water evaporated about 3 billion years ago, but a duo of planetary scientists from Caltech and Johns Hopkins...

Mattei et al. studied the antifreeze properties of exotic salts that exist on Mars. Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / USGS / SwRI.

Brine-Ice Mixtures Exist beneath Martian South Polar Cap: Study

Jan 26, 2022 by News Staff

In 2018, the Mars Advanced Radar for Subsurface and Ionosphere Sounding (MARSIS) instrument onboard ESA’s Mars Express orbiter found evidence of liquid...

This image shows a triple crater in Noachis Terra, Mars. The largest crater measures 45 km across, and the smallest 28 km. There are also signs of other sizeable craters, such as the round patches of sunken surface seen to the top right and bottom left. This image comprises data gathered by ESA’s Mars Express using its High Resolution Stereo Camera (HRSC) on August 6, 2020. This image was created using data from the nadir and color channels of the HRSC. The nadir channel is aligned perpendicular to the surface of Mars, as if looking straight down at the surface. North is to the right. Image credit: ESA / DLR / FU Berlin / CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO.

Study: Frequency of Asteroid Impacts in Inner Solar System Constant over Past 600 Million Years

Jan 21, 2022 by News Staff

Using a novel crater detection algorithm, which automatically counts the visible impact craters from a high-resolution image, a team of planetary researchers...

Global inventory of subglacial lakes: (a) inventory of northern hemisphere subglacial lakes (SGLs); the top right inset shows the location of part a (red box) in the northern hemisphere; (b) inventory of SGLs beneath the Antarctic Ice Sheet; the extents of larger lakes (such as PEL Lake and Lake Vostok) are defined by blue polygons; red circles represent stable lakes identified from radio-echo sounding (RES), and blue triangles represent active lakes that have been observed to drain at least once during the observation period; lakes labeled in green have been accessed and cleanly sampled with the exception of Glacier de Tête Rousse, which was monitored using boreholes (water level) and sonar (cavity geometry), and Lake Vostok. MIC - Mýrdalsjökull Ice Cap, VIC - Vatnajökull Ice Cap. Image credit: Livingstone et al., doi: 10.1038/s43017-021-00246-9.

Scientists Compile First Global Inventory of Subglacial Lakes

Jan 19, 2022 by News Staff

A multinational team of researchers has catalogued data on 773 subglacial lakes — repositories of ancient climate conditions, provide habitats for...

A selfie taken by NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity on Sol 2291 (January 15, 2019) at the ‘Rock Hall’ drill site, located on Vera Rubin Ridge. Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / MSSS.

Curiosity’s Samples from Martian Crater Strongly Depleted in Carbon-13, Researchers Say

Jan 18, 2022 by News Staff

An analysis of carbon isotopes in sediment samples taken by NASA’s Curiosity rover from Gale crater, Mars, leave planetary researchers with three plausible...

An artist’s impression of the super-Neptune exoplanet TOI-1728b. Image credit: Sci-News.com.

Computer Simulations Shed New Light on Gas Giant Formation

Jan 17, 2022 by News Staff

Solar system’s gas giants, such as Jupiter, Saturn, and massive exoplanets, were formed via the gas accretion onto the solid cores, each with a mass...

An artist’s conception of the cross section of a super-Earth with the National Ignition Facility target chamber superimposed over the mantle, looking into the core. Image credit: John Jett / Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Rocky Exoplanets with Four to Six Times Earth’s Mass Have Longest Dynamos, Study Suggests

Jan 13, 2022 by News Staff

The pressure and temperature conditions at which iron melts are important for rocky planets because they determine the size of the liquid metal core, an...

Pachhai et al. employ seismic data analysis and high-resolution geodynamic modeling to study the origin of ultralow-velocity zones beneath the Coral Sea between Australia and New Zealand. Image credit: Pachhai et al., doi: 10.1038/s41561-021-00871-5.

Ultralow-Velocity Zones are Leftovers from Early Earth’s Magma Ocean, New Study Suggests

Jan 3, 2022 by News Staff

Ultra-low velocity zones sit beneath the central Pacific and Africa, atop the outer core of Earth. In these areas, seismic waves slow by as much as half,...

$Possible scenarios of terrestrial planet formation: in the classic Wetherill-type model of oligarchic growth, the terrestrial planets formed by mutual collisions among Moon- to Mars-sized planetary embryos after the gas disk dissipated and accreted only a small fraction of CC planetesimals, which were scattered inward during Jupiter’s growth and/or putative migration; alternatively, the terrestrial planets may have formed within the lifetime of the gas disk by efficiently accreting ‘pebbles’ from the outer Solar System, which drift sunward through the disk due to gas drag; the two models differ in the amount of outer solar system material accreted by the terrestrial planets, which may be quantified using nucleosynthetic isotope anomalies. Image credit: Burkhardt et al., doi: 10.1126/sciadv.abj7601.$

Earth and Other Terrestrial Planets Formed from Inner Solar System Material, Study Suggests

Dec 28, 2021 by News Staff

Two fundamentally different processes of rocky planet formation exist, but it is unclear which one built the Earth and other terrestrial solar system planets....

Trace Gas Orbiter Finds Water Ice in Martian Polar Crater

Dec 27, 2021 by News Staff

ESA’s Trace Gas Orbiter has returned a stunning image of a 4-km- (2.5-mile) wide crater located in Vastitas Borealis, the largest lowland region of Mars. The...

The James Webb Space Telescope lifted off on an Ariane 5 rocket from Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana on December 25, 2021, on its exciting mission to unlock the secrets of the Universe. Image credit: ESA / CNES / Arianespace.

Webb Launches to Study Universe in Infrared

Dec 26, 2021 by News Staff

The James Webb Space Telescope, an international partnership between NASA, ESA and the Canadian Space Agency (CSA), launched at 7:20 a.m. EST (13:20 CET)...

An artist’s conception of the aerial biosphere in the cloud layers of Venus. In this picture, hypothetical microbial life in the clouds of Venus resides inside protective cloud particles and is carried by winds around the planet. Image credit: J. Petkowska.

Clouds of Venus May Be More Habitable than Previously Thought

Dec 21, 2021 by News Staff

Possible lifeforms in the Venusian clouds could be setting off a cascade of chemical reactions that is making the environment much more habitable, according...

Mars; the center of the scene shows the entire Valles Marineris canyon system. Image credit: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center.

ESA’s Trace Gas Orbiter Finds Water in Martian Canyon System

Dec 17, 2021 by News Staff

Planetary researchers using the Fine Resolution Epithermal Neutron Detector (FREND) instrument onboard ESA’s Trace Gas Orbiter (TGO) have found evidence...

The Mastcam-Z instrument on NASA’s Perseverance rover took this image of Ingenuity on December 1, 2021, when the rotorcraft was about 295 m (970 feet) away. Image credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / ASU / MSSS.

Ingenuity Helicopter Completes Its Seventeenth Flight on Mars

Dec 16, 2021 by News Staff

On December 5, 2021, NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter successfully flew to a new destination located very close to its original airfield, Wright Brothers...

Screenshot from the OneZoom tree of life explorer with leaves colored according to extinction risk and showing the ‘spiral’ view of the tree. Image credit: OneZoom.

OneZoom: Researchers Create Interactive Tree of Life

Dec 15, 2021 by News Staff

The interactive tree of life explorer OneZoom maps the connections between 2.2 million living species, the closest thing yet to a single view of all species...

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...

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

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...

Hubble’s photo of Jupiter displays the ever-changing landscape of its turbulent atmosphere. Image credit: NASA / ESA / Hubble / Amy Simon, NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center / Michael H. Wong, University of California, Berkeley / Joseph DePasquale, STScI.

Hubble Observes Solar System’s Giant Planets

Nov 19, 2021 by News Staff

Hubble’s snapshots of the outer Solar System’s planets — Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune — reveal both extreme and subtle changes...

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