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Juice Astrobiology Mission To Fly Past Earth For Third Gravity Assist
[ESA] The European Space Agency’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (Juice) will return to Earth on 28 September, with flight controllers guiding the spacecraft close to our home planet to alter its speed and direction en route to Jupiter. Getting a spacecraft to the outer Solar System is no easy feat. Juice’s journey began almost 3.5…
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Planetary Health Check 2026 Finds Mounting Pressures Across Earth’s Life Support Systems – Reports And Proceedings
[Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK)] Seven breached Planetary Boundaries continue to worsen as…
Prebiotic Peptide Formation Triggered By Urea-rich Warm Little Ponds On Early Earth
[Bioorganic Chemistry]. In the study of the origin of life, the polymerization of amino acids…
Thyles Rupes Region Of Mars
[ESA] We’re used to seeing pictures of Mars that are very different in colour to…
Earth As A Potential Source Of Llife For Europa’s Subsurface Ocean
The paper discusses the possibility of dust particles containing living bacteria ejected from Earth reaching Europa and landing on its surface. It is shown that, taking certain factors into account, over a period of 30 − 80 Myr (the estimated age of Europa’s ocean), Jupiter’s moon would have been impacted…
Keep readingDust To Dust: Prospects For Passive Technosignatures As Relics Of ETI
Technological societies are separated in time, not just space — that is the lesson of the Drake equation. Might the best way to seek them be to find technosignatures that persist long after their creators? I present work I and my collaborators have done on the idea of passive technosignatures,…
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Astrogeology
Atmospheres, Climate, Weather
Energy Deposition In Planetary And Exoplanetary Atmospheres Induced By Cosmic Rays
[astro-ph.EP] Cosmic rays can significantly alter the abundances of certain species in the upper layers of planetary atmospheres, especially in terms of their biosignatures. To fully understand the extent of this effect, it is essential to accurately model the interactions of cosmic rays with planetary magnetic fields. We used the CosmicTransmutation code to study the…
Read moreExploration Gear & Tech
Tricorder Tech: New Handheld Device Maps Chemical Composition Using Infrared Light
[Optica] Researchers have developed a compact, handheld mid-infrared imaging spectrometer that can produce high-resolution chemical maps of a sample without using any stains or labels.…
Water Planet Recon: How Accurately Can We Measure Earth Ocean’s Deepest Point?
[Research Organization of Information and Systems]. How deep is the deepest ocean—and how precisely can we actually measure it? Bathymetric maps obtained by each sounding…
Deep Learning of SHERLOC Raman Spectra For Facilitating Mars Astromaterial Identification
[Spectrochimica Acta Part A: Molecular and Biomolecular Spectroscopy] Raman spectroscopy has been explored for planetary exploration, particularly through the SHERLOC instrument for Mars habitability and…
Imaging & Spectroscopy
In situ Characterization Of Volatile And Refractory Hydrocarbons Produced By UV Photolysis Of Interstellar C2H2 Ice
[astro-ph.GA] Acetylene (C2H2) is commonly observed in star-forming regions, young stellar objects, and the Solar System. Laboratory and theoretical studies have linked this simplest alkyne…
Deposits From Aqueous Processes Along The Northern Wall Of Melas Chasma
[NASA]. It has been known since the 1970s when the Viking orbiters took pictures of Mars that there are large (i.e., several kilometers-thick) mounds of…
An Updated Model For Epsilon Eridani b and Prospects for Imaging With The Roman Coronagraph
[astro-ph.EP] Epsilon Eridani b, the nearest known Jupiter analog, has its orbit and mass constrained from radial velocity (RV) and absolute astrometry, and its atmosphere…
Biosignatures & Paleobiology
Tracing 700 Million Years Of Cell Evolution
[KAUST] Publishing in Nature Communications, a KAUST-led team has developed the AI tool Unify to help scientists compare similar cell types across distant species[1]. This…
PlainMap: A Lightweight, Restartable Mapping Pipeline For Ancient And Modern DNA
[q-bio.GN] Mapping sequencing reads to a reference genome requires preprocessing and alignment choices that can vary with library type, fragment length, sequencing platform, and reference…
Glycine In The Interstellar Medium Revisited: Resolving Conformational Complexity Kinetically
[astro-ph.GA] Numerous attempts to detect glycine, a simple amino acid and a key building block of proteins in all life on Earth, in the interstellar…