Someday, a catalog of molecular fragments might help scientists identify extraterrestrial life on our solar system’s icy moons.
Space & Planets
Posted inEditors' Highlights
The Tumbling Boulders of Orientale Basin
Mapping boulder fields and boulder tracks highlights the seismic hazard still present on the Moon.
Posted inResearch Spotlights
Decoding the Age of the Ice at Mars’s North Pole
Exposure to sunlight creates telltale patterns in the polar ice cap that change over time, potentially providing insight into the climatic history of the Red Planet.
Posted inNews
Chance the Hacker: How Earth Stayed Habitable
New analysis indicates that planetary feedbacks alone don’t make habitability an inevitability.
Posted inEditors' Vox
A Fallen Rising Star
The last works of Marzieh (Mari) Foroutan, an early-career martian geologist who was lost to us in 2020, have now been completed and published in JGR: Planets.
Posted inNews
An Asteroid “Double Disaster” Struck Germany in the Miocene
By analyzing sediments jostled by ground shaking, researchers have shown that two impact craters near Stuttgart were created by independent asteroid impacts rather than a binary asteroid strike.
Posted inEditors' Highlights
Radio on Jupiter, Brought to You by Ganymede
Another first from NASA’s Juno spacecraft: the detection of Jupiter radio emissions influenced by the moon Ganymede, over a range of about 250 kilometers in the polar region of Jupiter.
Posted inOpinions
Charting Satellite Courses in a Crowded Thermosphere
As the number of satellites in low Earth orbit grows by leaps and bounds, accurate calculations of the effects of atmospheric drag on their trajectories are becoming critically important.
Posted inResearch Spotlights
Juno Maps Water Ice Across Northern Ganymede
Infrared observations from instruments on the Juno spacecraft cover regions of Ganymede not visible to Earth-based telescopes.
Posted inNews
Very Good Space Boys: Robotic Dogs May Dig Into Martian Caves
Four-legged, autonomous robots known as “Mars Dogs” will explore previously inaccessible caves to look for signs of life and potential locations for future human colonies.