SETI
Stars provide an enormous gain for interstellar communications at their gravitational focus, perhaps as part of an interstellar network. If the Sun is part of such a network, there should be probes at the gravitational foci of nearby stars.
Extinction events
Researchers at University College Cork (UCC) and the Swedish Museum of Natural History examined the end-Permian mass extinction (252 million years ago) that eliminated almost every species on Earth, with entire ecosystems collapsing.
Moons and Icy Worlds
On icy worlds, the ice shell and subsurface ocean form a coupled system -- heat and salinity flux from the ice shell induced by the ice thickness gradient drives circulation in the ocean, and in turn, the heat transport by ocean circulation shapes the ice shell.
Astrochemistry
Many of us have probably already - literally - handled the chemical compound iso-propanol: it can used as an antiseptic, a solvent or a cleaning agent. But this substance is not only found on Earth: researchers led by Arnaud Belloche from the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn have now detected the molecule in interstellar space for the first time.
Alpha Centauri
On the heels of a successful launch on June 26, NASA is set to launch two more sounding rockets from northern Australia during the first half of July.
Extrasolar Planets
It is reasonable to assume that the structure of a planet and the interior distribution of its components are determined by its formation history. We thus follow the growth of a planet from a small embryo through its subsequent evolution.
Astrochemistry
Planetary systems such as our own are formed after a long process where matter condenses from diffuse clouds to stars, planets, asteroids, comets and residual dust, undergoing dramatic changes in physical and chemical state in less than a few million years.
Geobiology
Terrestrial and marine habitats have been considered the ecosystems with the highest primary production on earth by far, i.e., the conversion of inorganic to organic carbon.
Extrasolar Planets
The atmospheres of exoplanets harbor critical information about their habitability. However, extracting and interpreting that information requires both high-quality spectroscopic data and a comparative analysis to characterize the findings.
Mars
We examine the observed properties of the Nili Fossae olivine-clay-carbonate lithology from orbital data and in situ by the Mars 2020 rover at the Séítah unit in Jezero crater, including: 1) composition (Liu, 2022) 2) grain size (Tice, 2022) 3) inferred viscosity (calculated based on geochemistry collected by SuperCam (Wiens, 2022)).
Missions, Hardware, Software, & Sensors
Someday, a swarm of cellphone-size robots could whisk through the water beneath the miles-thick icy shell of Jupiter's moon Europa or Saturn's moon Enceladus, looking for signs of alien life. Packed inside a narrow ice-melting probe that would tunnel through the frozen crust, the tiny robots would be released underwater, swimming far from their mothercraft to take the measure of a new world.
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