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Missed Detections and False Alarms in a CNN Technosignature Detector on Breakthrough Listen Data
[astro-ph.IM] Radio technosignature searches rely on machine learning detectors to shrink the candidate pool before a human looks at it. They are validated on held-out data from the training distribution, which excludes the cases where they are most likely to fail: a technosignature has unknown morphology, and terrestrial interference is unbounded in variety. I trained…
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Ancient Clays Near The Hellas Basin On Mars
[NASA]. Ancient clay-rich sediments (orangish color and polygonal fractures in our enhanced color cutout) exposed…
A Hydrogen Atmosphere Could Keep Exomoons Habitable For Billions Of Years
[Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics] Liquid water is considered essential for life. Surprisingly, however,…
Ring Pattern Reveal The Mechanism By Which Unseen Planets And Dust Particles Gather On Their Own
[Kyushu University] Planetary systems like our solar system are born within a disk of gas…
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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Astronomy & Telescopes
Atmospheres, Climate, Weather
Elastic Properties of Titan Tholins Revealed by Brillouin Spectroscopy
[astro-ph.EP] Titan tholins, complex organic solids synthesized by simulating photochemical processes in Titan’s atmosphere, are widely regarded as analogs to organic surface materials on the Saturnian moon. Their mechanical properties are critical for understanding the evolution of Titan’s geomorphology and crustal layering. Here, we report the first direct experimental determination of the complete set of…
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Using Nuclear Technology To Change How We Explore Icy Ocean Worlds: Examples From Nuclear Powered Mission Concept Designs
[Frontiers] Icy ocean worlds represent some of the most compelling targets in the search for extraterrestrial life, yet their exploration is constrained by significant logistical…
Perseverance Mars Rover Sets Off-World Record for Total Distance Driven
[NASA]. NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover has driven farther than any vehicle ever has on the surface of another world. On Oct. 11, the rover’s odometer…
An Interdisciplinary Approach To Sampling Hard Rock Cores Of The Oceanic Crust For Microbiological And Biogeochemical Research
[Scientific Drilling] Studying life in the deep, rocky subseafloor involves many layers of technological and methodological challenges, and each drilling project or expedition must make…
Imaging & Spectroscopy
VUV And mid-UV Photoabsorption Cross Sections Of Thin Films Of Glycine And Alanine: Application To Their Photochemistry In The Solar System
[Photochemistry and Photobiology] Experiments conducted in Low Earth Orbit (LEO) since the 1990s have investigated the evolution of organic matter in solid-phase (including amino acids)…
How Long Could Volcanic Plumes Persist In The Venus Atmosphere?
[astro-ph.EP] Resolving the ambiguity surrounding current Venusian volcanism is a primary objective for upcoming missions like EnVision and VERITAS. This study uses the Venus Planetary…
aRieL – Reinforcement Learning For The Ariel Space Telescope Scheduling
[astro-ph.EP] The Ariel mission will conduct a population level survey of hundreds of exoplanet atmospheres, requiring observations to be scheduled across a large and diverse…
Biosignatures & Paleobiology
Tree of Life Program Targets Publication Of 200 Genome Notes Per Month
Editor’s note: If we aspire to mount expeditions to new worlds and then embrace the task of characterizing and quantifying whatever life forms we find,…
A Proposal To Make Mars Sample Return A Collaborative NASA, ESA, And CNSA Effort
[Astrobiology (Journal) via PubMed] Humanity’s self-awareness drives the quest to understand the origins of life. Although Earth history has erased much of our planet’s early…
Call For White Papers On Multi-Cycle Treasury Concepts With JWST
[ESA Hubble] STScI has issued a call for White Papers for compelling scientific ideas for Multi-Cycle Treasury (MCT) programmes that require large allocations of JWST…