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Astrobiology Graduate Conference (AbGradCon26) Update
Editors’ note from Keith Cowing, Astrobiology.com: I’m happy to have Astrobiology.com serve as one of the sponsors of AbGradCon 2026. I have been involved with NASA Astrobiology since the very first organizational meetings at NASA Ames in 1996 and 1997. When websites were still a new thing I hosted the first two Astrobiology Science Conference…
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Mars Curiosity Reaches 1-Kilometer Elevation Gain
[NASA]. NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover reached the pinnacle — so far — of its 14-year-old…
Dragonfly Gets Wired Up While Titan Landing Area Is Named
[NASA]. Peeking into the clean room at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in…
Amplified Cooling Of Snowball Earth From A Salt-albedo Feedback
[Climate of the Past] It is believed that the atmospheric circulation on Snowball Earth produced…
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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![NASA SMD ROSES-25 Amendment 68: New Opportunity: D.8 Habitable Worlds Observatory Precursor Science Investigations [UPDATE 2]](https://i0.wp.com/astrobiology.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/HWO.jpg?fit=1200%2C675&ssl=1)
Habitable Zones
Astronomy & Telescopes
Atmospheres, Climate, Weather
The Venus Benchmark: Resolving Degeneracies in Terrestrial Exoplanet Spectra with DAVINCI
[astro-ph.EP]. The characterization of terrestrial exoplanets with thick, CO2-dominated atmospheres via transmission and emission spectroscopy is limited by degeneracies between atmospheric composition, cloud structure, and surface conditions. These degeneracies are particularly acute for planets in or near the Venus Zone, where sulfuric acid aerosol layers and deep-atmosphere opacity render the lower atmosphere and surface spectroscopically…
Read moreExploration Gear & Tech
Rethinking The Origin Of Life At Seafloor Hydrothermal Vents
[PNAS] Alkaline vents have dominated a class of hypotheses for the origins of life since their discovery a quarter of century ago, but advances in…
Surface Enhanced Raman Spectroscopy of Planetary Materials Using Laser Deposited Plasmonic Gold Nanoparticles
[x-mol.net] This work demonstrates a surface-enhanced raman spectroscopy (SERS) approach based on laser deposition of Au plasmonic nanoparticles onto several relevant mineral surfaces. A pulsed…
NASA Solar System Exploration Research Virtual Institute (SSERVI) Cooperative Agreement Notice (NNH26ZDA016C) Final Text And Due Dates
[NASA] The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Science Mission Directorate (SMD) and Human Spaceflight Mission Directorate (HSMD) have released the final text of the…
Imaging & Spectroscopy
The Ultraviolet Spectrograph on ESA’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer Mission (JUICE-UVS)
[astro-ph.EP] A mix of internal and external radiation shielding plates are used, with those on the instrument electronics plus spectrograph sections shown here in gold…
Impacts Of Correlated Noise On Retrievals Of Exo-Earth Atmospheres
[astro-ph.EP] The Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO) aims to accomplish high-contrast imaging and spectroscopy of true Earth analogs for the first time. However, high-contrast spectroscopy with…
Slysh Haloes: The Waste Heat Of Cold Computing As A Submillimetre Technosignature
[astro-ph.IM] Searches for Dysonian waste heat have operated almost exclusively in the mid-infrared and are therefore sensitive primarily to technology radiating at 100-600K. We argue…
Biosignatures & Paleobiology
Prebiotic Cationic Amino Acids Support Formation Of An Ancient Protein Fold
[biorxiv.org] The evolutionary basis for the selection of the standard proteinogenic amino acids remains elusive, particularly for the long cationic amino acids, lysine and arginine,…
Determining The “Biosignature Threshold” For Life Detection On Biotic, Abiotic, or Prebiotic Worlds.
[Astrobiology (Journal) via PubMed] The field of prebiotic chemistry has demonstrated that complex organic chemical systems that exhibit various life-like properties can be produced abiotically…
Icy Ocean Planet Research: NASA ROSES-25 Amendment 71: New Opportunity A.16 Cryosphere
[NASA]. A.16 Cryosphere solicits high-impact efforts focused on sea ice, ice sheets, and glaciers. The expectation is that proposed investigations will use the wealth of…