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Why Europa’s Hidden Ocean May Be More Difficult To Reach Than Scientists Thought
[Rutgers University] Europa, one of Jupiter’s icy moons, long has fascinated scientists because of what may lie beneath its frozen shell: a global ocean of liquid water. That hidden ocean has made Europa one of the most compelling places in the solar system to study the conditions that might support life. But new research led…
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Pinpointing Where Cells First Begin Copying DNA
[Medical Research Council (MRC) Laboratory of Medical Sciences] Every time a cell divides, it must…
Experimental Measurements of Benzene Ice Critical Saturation Ratios on Titan Tholins and Impact on the Microphysical Modeling of Titan’s South Polar Benzene Cloud
[astro-ph.EP] The Cassini Composite Infrared Spectrometer (CIRS) revealed the presence of a benzene (C6H6) ice…
From Mars to Minas: Research Reclassifies Organisms That Thrive In Highly Saline Environments
[JORNAL DA USP – Universidade de São Paulo] Organisms that defy life by thriving in…
A Comprehensive Study Of Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko In The 2021/2022 Apparition. II. Colorimetry, Polarimetry, Modeling
[astro-ph.EP] This paper presents the second part of our multi-technique observational study of comet 67P…
Atmospheric Retrieval Evidence For Water Isotopologue HDO On Exoplanet WASP-39b
[astro-ph.EP] Hydrogen-isotopologues are commonly used to trace the chemical processing and origin of hydrogen-bearing species…
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
Astronomy & Telescopes
Atmospheres, Climate, Weather
Triassic Inferno: Fires Raged Across Europe For thousands Of Years During Past Global Warming
[Utrecht University] The end-Triassic mass extinction, 201 million years ago, is linked to volcanism that resulted from the break-up of Pangea and which pumped out vast amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere causing extreme global warming of 5 to 10 degrees Celsius. As a result, tree-dominated vegetation collapsed and the highly disturbed landscapes were colonized…
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Astronaut Training For Underground Science Expeditions
ESA CAVES (Cooperative Adventure for Valuing and Exercising human behaviour and performance Skills) is an ESA astronaut training program. The three-week course prepares astronauts to…
NASA SMD ROSES-25 Amendment 65: New Opportunity: C.4 Planetary Science Enabling Facilities
C.4 The Planetary Science Enabling Facilities (PSEF) program element solicits proposals for experimental and analytical research facilities to be made available to the community that does…
A Pressure-Supported Pneumatic Architecture for Robust Deep Drilling on Mars: Performance Modeling, Sizing, and Mission Integration.
[Astrobiology] Accessing the martian deep subsurface is a long-standing scientific priority for astrobiology, climate reconstruction, and planetary evolution, yet robotic drilling missions have historically been…
Imaging & Spectroscopy
Mars Express And Psyche Same Day Imagery of Mars
[ESA] On 15 May, whilst en route to a metallic asteroid, NASA’s Psyche mission flew just 4500 km above the surface of Mars. It was…
Mapping Alien Continents: Achieving Optical VLBI For Exoplanet Imaging
[NIAC / NASA] The scientific goal of the proposed work will be reconstructing the image, i.e. resolving surface features, of an Earth-like exoplanet around a…
Interstellar Objects During Stellar Encounters
[astro-ph.EP] As they orbit within the Galaxy, stars swim through a vast population of interstellar objects (ISOs). In this paper, we use N-body simulations to…
Biosignatures & Paleobiology
Tryptophan Became Part Of The Universal Genetic Code Post-LUCA
[biorxiv.org] We evaluate whether tryptophan (W), widely thought to be the last of the 20 canonical amino acids added to the genetic code, was already…
Molecule-dependent Abundance Behavior of Oxygen-bearing Complex Organics in High-Mass Star-Forming Regions: A Uniform 50-source Survey
[astro-ph.GA] We present a uniform IRAM-30m survey analysis of four oxygen-bearing complex organic molecules (COMs), methanol (CH3OH), acetaldehyde (CH3CHO), methyl formate (CH3OCHO), and dimethyl ether…
A Dual-Burst Geometrical Prescription For Concurrent Signaling
[astro-ph.IM] We propose a dual-burst implementation of concurrent signaling for technosignature searches. Concurrent signaling is a Schelling-point prescription for implicit coordination between transmitters and receivers…