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Astrobiology: Fifty Years After Viking: New Special Collection Available Now
Guest edited by Dr. Scott M. Perl (LA-NHM) and Dr. Mary Beth Wilhelm (NASA Ames) To mark the 50th anniversary of NASA’s Viking landings, the journal Astrobiology has published a dedicated special collection revisiting the mission that first and last attempted to directly measure cellular life on another world and the five decades of debate,…
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Early Exploration Of The Scientific Discovery Space For The Habitable Worlds Observatory
[astro-ph.IM] The Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO) is a future NASA flagship mission concept identified by…
The Ĝ Infrared Search for Extraterrestrial Civilizations with Large Energy Supplies. V. When Galaxies Glow with Industry
[astro-ph.GA] We present the most robust stellar population synthesis (SPS)-based search for galaxy-spanning technological waste…
Astrochemistry: A Cosmic Recycling System In Action In The Helix Nebula
[Northwestern University] An international team of scientists, including Northwestern University astrophysicists, has captured an unprecedented…
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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Habitable Zones
Astronomy & Telescopes
Atmospheres, Climate, Weather
Altered Cosmic Organics As Venus’ Ultraviolet Absorbers
[astro-ph.EP] Venus’ ultraviolet (UV) absorbers significantly contribute to the atmosphere’s energy budget. However, the composition of these absorbers remains a mystery. Here, we show that mixtures of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) and iron-bearing compounds, analogs of altered cometary dust, excellently match Venus’ spectra from the cloud tops to the sub-cloud atmosphere across the UV and…
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Planetary Recon: Interworld Slingshot Resource Surveys
[NASA] This proposal explores a new class of reconnaissance spacecraft that map minerals from orbit using Raman spectroscopy during high-speed flybys–without landing, sample return, or…
Preparing ExoMars For Rosalind Franklin Astrobiology Rover Delivery
[ESA] The footage shows the simultaneous deployment of two landing legs from the ExoMars landing platform, in two sequential pairs. The legs travel stowed on…
Hindsight: Similarity-Based Analytics For Mars Rover Drive Retrieval
[cs.HC] While Mars rover operators plan drives across hazardous Martian terrain and diagnose unexpected faults, the necessary information is distributed across separate systems and often…
Imaging & Spectroscopy
Orbital Biosignature Assay: Pyramid Lake in Bloom
[NASA] The OLI-2 (Operational Land Imager-2) on the Landsat 9 satellite acquired this natural-color image of the bloom in October 2024. One day earlier, the…
Molecular Assembly As A Universal Biosignature Measurable By Mass Spectrometry
[PNAS] Detecting life beyond Earth requires biosignatures that do not depend on the chemistry of known organisms. Molecular assembly (MA), derived from Assembly Theory, quantifies…
Micropeloidal Textures – Definition, Formation And Potential As Biosignatures
[Earth-Science Reviews] Microbial biosignatures result from the interactions between microbial populations, metabolic processes, organic and mineral products, and the surrounding physicochemical environment. During the last…
Biosignatures & Paleobiology
Chemically Modified Sugars As Multifunctional Precursors For Direct, Template-Free Synthesis Of Nanoporous Carbonaceous Materials
[JACS] Carbonaceous solids with pores in the nanometer domain are of great technological importance owing to their amenability to sorption/separation, catalysis, and electrochemical applications. Herein,…
Autonomous Multi-Agent Reconstruction of Prebiotic Reaction Networks Reveals Organizational Features of Amino Acid Synthesis
[chemrxiv.org] Decades of origin-of-life research have uncovered hundreds of prebiotically plausible reactions across hydrothermal, surface, and biochemical environments, yet this knowledge remains fragmented across chemistry,…
First Detection Of C2H+ In The Interstellar Medium
[astro-ph.GA] Despite the detection of nearly 350 molecules in the interstellar medium, almost half of which are carbon chains, the pathways that build molecular complexity…