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Astrobiologist Dale Andersen’s Antarctic Field Report: 3 November 2026: Digging Out and Packing Before the Traverse to Lake Untersee
[Dale Andersen]. Hi Keith – We’ve continued our first job of the season which has been digging snow. Drifting snow around the base resulted in quite a few people at the airbase working on the ice runway and moving snow around the facility to remove snow from around the various buildings and other infrastructure. Our…
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When Should We Listen for Alien Signals? SETI Institute Scientists Turn to Game Theory.
[SETI Institute]. Using game theory and the Allen Telescope Array, researchers are testing whether extraterrestrial…
Cheops Guest Observers Opportunity: JWST/HST Fast Track Proposals
[STSCI]. ESA’s Characterising Exoplanet Satellite (CHEOPS) has helped revolutionize our understanding of exoplanet science during…
Eyes on Exoplanets Software October Release Notes
[NASA] On October 28, 2026, a new version of Eyes on Exoplanets was released. This…
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,…
Keep readingExoplanets, -moons, -comets
Astrogeology
Astronomy & Telescopes
Atmospheres, Climate, Weather
Deep-Learning Identification and Global Characterization of Energetic O2+ Beams at Mars
[physics.space-ph] Martian ionospheric ions can be accelerated away from Mars by the solar wind, contributing substantially to atmospheric ion escape. Here, we develop a U-Net-based image segmentation model to identify a distinct population of escaping planetary ions, energetic O2+ beams, from a decade of Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN (MAVEN) observations and perform an event-based…
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Astrobiologist Dale Andersen’s Antarctic Field Report: 29 October 2026: Preparing For The Overland Traverse To Lake Untersee [UPDATE]
Update: note from Dale at 6:00 pm EDT / 22:00 UTC: “It has been pretty breezy all day with blowing snow. Nevertheless it’s been a…
Astrobiologist Dale Andersen’s Antarctic Field Report: 28 October 2026: Shoveling Snow In Antarctica
[Dale Andersen] : Hi Keith, A quick note while the base WiFi is up and running. We spent the last two days digging out the…
Astrobiologist Dale Andersen’s Antarctic Field Report: 26 October 2026: Flying South
Keith’s note: This report may be updated over the course of the day. Dale’s departure from Cape Town was scheduled for 10:00 am Local time…
Imaging & Spectroscopy
NASA Explores Potential Commercial Servicing for Hubble Telescope
[NASA] NASA issued a Request for Information Oct. 29 to learn more about industry capabilities for in-space servicing to support the agency’s Hubble Space Telescope.…
Complex Organic Molecules in Protostars with ALMA Spectral Surveys (COMPASS) III. CH3OH isotopic fractionation in the low-mass protostar BHR71-IRS1
[astro-ph.GA]. [Abridged] Methanol is a complex organic molecule detected in both ice and gas toward star-forming regions. Due to its high abundance, its rarer isotopologues,…
Study Details One of Oldest Mars Meteorites Ever Found
[NASA]. When a rose-colored meteorite was found in the Sahara Desert in 2022, no one knew how old it was or where it came from.…
Biosignatures & Paleobiology
A Mitochondrion-like Ribosome In An Insect Endosymbiont
[biorxiv.org] Understanding how the mitochondrion evolved from a bacterial endosymbiont to an organelle is obscured by time and a lack of comparative examples. It is…
A Type Of Arctic Ocean Bacteria May Be Using Acetone To Turn Carbon Into Food
[Concordia University] A newly identified Arctic Ocean bacterium may have an unusual way of making the building blocks it needs to grow. Using acetone, a…
Extraterrestrial Chemical Boundary Conditions and Evolutionary Opportunity Space on Early Earth
[essopenarchive.org] Extraterrestrial material has often been evaluated as delivered cargo: amino acids, nucleobases, organics, brines, or biological vectors. A boundary-condition approach asks how arrival altered…
