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Humanity didn’t get any good views of the surface of Ceres until 2015, when NASA’s Dawn mission snapped the first (relatively) close-by images of the dwarf planet. With these, came the revelation that Ceres’ surface is surprisingly diverse in terms of structures and composition. In turn, this pointed to unexpected levels of geological activity brewing unseen below the crust. Ceres, as its classification of a dwarf planet suggests, is very small. So small... that researchers were absolutely convinced that it had cooled down completely all the way to its core and that it was, geologically speaking, a dead world. What...

NASA has a provided a tantalizing teaser photo ahead of the highly-anticipated release next week of the first deep-space images from the James Webb Telescope – an instrument so powerful it can peer back into the origins of the Universe. An engineering test image. (NASA, CSA, and FGS team) The US$10 billion observatory – launched in December last year and now orbiting the Sun a million miles (1.5 million kilometers) away from Earth – can look where no telescope has looked before thanks to its enormous primary mirror and instruments that focus on infrared, allowing it to peer through dust...

Extraterrestrial space archaeology is engaged with the search for relics of other technological civilizations. It resembles a survey for plastic bottles in the ocean as they keep accumulating over time. The senders may not be alive when we find the relics. These circumstances are different from those encountered by the famous Drake equation, which quantifies the likelihood of detecting radio signals from extraterrestrials. That case resembles a phone conversation in which the counterpart must be active when we listen. Not so in extraterrestrial archaeology. What would be the substitute to Drake’s equation for space archeology? If our instruments survey a...

Eliminate the impossible, as Sherlock Holmes once said, and the truth, no matter how improbable, lies in whatever remains. Good advice for detectives — and, it turns out, for astronomers. Astronomy is often little more than piecing together scattered clues, carefully eliminating possibilities and arriving at an improbable truth. Take, for example, the announcement of an exomoon discovery back in 2017. Observations seemed to show the presence of large moon, one as big as Neptune, orbiting a gas giant in a distant solar system. But, as the authors of the announcement were careful to state, the discovery was far from...

The US experts want to know how interstellar space travel affects the microscopic animals, known for an ability to survive extreme conditions including in outer space. In a new paper, they've proposed building small space probes containing tardigrades, also known as 'water bears', that would travel at up to 30 per cent the speed of light into space. These probes would be propelled by laser light instead of rocket fuel, from a laser array stationed on Earth, or possibly the moon. At speeds of roughly 100 million miles per hour, tardigrades would reach the next solar system, Proxima Centauri, in...

A summary of decades of research on a rather 'out-there' idea involving viruses from space raises questions on just how scientific we can be when it comes to speculating on the history of life on Earth. It's easy to throw around words like crackpot, rogue, and maverick in describing the scientific fringe, but then papers like this one, from 2018, come along and leave us blinking owlishly, unsure of where to even begin. A total of 33 names were listed as authors on this review, which was published by Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology back in August 2018. The...

NASA's Curiosity rover has discovered previously unknown organic molecules, ammonia and benzoic acid, on Mars that could be possible indicators of ancient life. The findings stem from a new technique used by the American space agency in 2017 when the rover's drill stopped working, but the team re-routed Curiosity to place dirt samples into cups pre-filled with a chemical mixture instead of the typical empty containers. The molecules are not biosignatures, evidence of past or present life, but according Maëva Millan, a postdoctoral fellow at NASA's Goddard Spaceflight Center, they are good indicators of the presence of biosignatures.... The dirt...

In the search for life on other planets, the presence of oxygen in a planet's atmosphere is one potential sign of biological activity that might be detected by future telescopes. A new study, however, describes several scenarios in which a lifeless rocky planet around a sun-like star could evolve to have oxygen in its atmosphere. The new findings, published April 13 in AGU Advances, highlight the need for next-generation telescopes that are capable of characterizing planetary environments and searching for multiple lines of evidence for life in addition to detecting oxygen. ...

As NASA's rover Perseverance explores the surface of Mars, scientists hunting for signs of ancient life on the distant planet are using data gathered on a mission much closer to home at a lake in southwest Turkey. NASA says the minerals and rock deposits at Salda are the nearest match on Earth to those around the Jezero Crater where the spacecraft landed and which is believed to have once been flooded with water. Information gathered from Lake Salda may help the scientists as they search for fossilised traces of microbial life preserved in sediment thought to have been deposited around...

Heavenly bodies stir up routine catastrophes March 18 2003 at 01:30PM By Graeme Addison Legend has it that when two people get together and er... bond, the Earth will move – at least in a metaphorical sense. Likewise, it takes two heavenly bodies, an impactor and a target, to come together with Earth-shattering force to form a crater. There’s nothing dreamlike about this: it happens, frequently, throughout the solar system. Impact catastrophes are routine. Just over two-billion years ago, a chunk of asteroid at least the size of Table Mountain struck the landmass that is now South Africa. It hurtled...

Deinococcus radiodurans is an extremophile microbe capable of surviving freezing cold temperatures, ionizing radiation, ultraviolet light, and dehydration. And as new research published today in Frontiers in Microbiology shows, this bacterium can also survive the harsh conditions of outer space. Dried out samples of Deinococcus were brought back to life after spending over three years on a panel outside the International Space Station. Back in 2008, Yamagishi and his colleagues used aircraft and balloons to detect and document microbes floating in the upper atmosphere. Naturally, samples of Deinococcus radiodurans—a microbe Guinness World Records lists as the most radiation-resistant lifeform—were found...

If there is life in the Solar System outside of Earth, Jupiter's moon Europa and Saturn's moon Enceladus are two of the most likely spots to hold them. However, any extraterrestrial creatures on these celestial objects probably are not related to us, according to a new study. The research, presented at the annual fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union by Purdue University geophysicist Jay Melosh, looked at the idea of "lithopanspermia," an idea that life hopped from one planet to another via rocks that were ejected into space, according to Space.com, which first reported the news. [snip] In June,...

An international team of scientists at NASA have found sugar molecules on two different meteorites, the agency announced on Nov. 19. The new discovery adds to the growing list of biologically important compounds that have been found in meteorites and supports the theory that chemical reactions in asteroids can play an important role in creating and supporting life, the space agency said in a statement. Researchers said they discovered “ribose and other bio-essential sugars” in the extraterrestrial rock, adding that ribose is a “crucial component of RNA (ribonucleic acid)”—essential for the regulation and expression of genes. “In much of modern...

An international team has found sugars essential to life in meteorites. The new discovery adds to the growing list of biologically important compounds that have been found in meteorites, supporting the hypothesis that chemical reactions in asteroids – the parent bodies of many meteorites – can make some of life’s ingredients. If correct, meteorite bombardment on ancient Earth may have assisted the origin of life with a supply of life’s building blocks. Image of asteroid Bennu This is a mosaic image of asteroid Bennu, from NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft. The discovery of sugars in meteorites supports the hypothesis that chemical reactions...

NASA engineers are already working on an underwater rover they hope could one day tackle the challenges posed by ocean worlds like Jupiter's moon Europa and Saturn's moon Enceladus. A team has been working on such a robot, called Buoyant Rover for Under-Ice Exploration or BRUIE, for a few years now. NASA is taking a prototype of that rover to Antarctica for testing in the most similar environment to those moons found on Earth. The tests will take place at Australia's Casey research station along the coast of Antarctica far south of Australia, where BRUIE will spend a month exploring...

Ever since scientists discovered that certain microbes can get their energy from electrical charges, researchers have wondered how they do it. Bacteria don't have mouths, so they need another way to bring their fuel into their bodies. New research from Washington University in St. Louis reveals how one such bacteria pulls in electrons straight from an electrode source. The work from the laboratory of Arpita Bose, assistant professor of biology in Arts & Sciences, was published Nov. 5 in the scientific journal mBio. "The molecular underpinning of this process has been difficult to unravel until our work," Bose said. "This...

"Our results support the idea that methane release on Mars might be characterized by small, transient geological events," researcher Frank Daerden said. The European Space Agency's Mars Express probe measured methane in the Martian atmosphere a day after NASA's Curiosity rover detected the gas in Gale Crater. Photo by ESA ============================================================= April 2 (UPI) -- Some 15 years ago, a European probe measured traces of methane in the Martian atmosphere. Now, NASA's Curiosity rover and the European Space Agency's Mars Express have confirmed the gas' presence in the air above Gale Crater. "The presence of methane could enhance habitability and...

Curiosity rover mission recently determined that background levels of methane in Mars' atmosphere cycle seasonally, peaking in the northern summer. The six-wheeled robot has also detected two surges to date of the gas inside the Red Planet's 96-mile-wide (154 kilometers) Gale Crater — once in June 2013, and then again in late 2013 through early 2014. These finds have intrigued astrobiologists, because methane is a possible biosignature. Though the gas can be produced by a variety of geological processes, the vast majority of methane in Earth's air is pumped out by microbes and other living creatures. Some answers may soon...

While the team found that the bacteria isolated from the ISS did contain different genes than their Earthling counterparts, those genes did not make the bacteria more detrimental to human health. The bacteria are instead simply responding, and perhaps evolving, to survive in a stressful environment. As the conversation about sending travelers to Mars gets more serious, there has been an increasing interest in understanding how microbes behave in enclosed environments. "People will be in little capsules where they cannot open windows, go outside or circulate the air for long periods of time," said Hartmann. "We're genuinely concerned about how...

Barely living "zombie" bacteria and other forms of life constitute an immense amount of carbon deep within Earth's subsurface—245 to 385 times greater than the carbon mass of all humans on the surface, according to scientists nearing the end of a 10-year international collaboration to reveal Earth's innermost secrets. On the eve of the American Geophysical Union's annual meeting, scientists with the Deep Carbon Observatory today reported several transformational discoveries, including how much and what kinds of life exist in the deep subsurface under the greatest extremes of pressure, temperature, and low nutrient availability.Drilling 2.5 kilometers into the seafloor, and...