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New Horizons Finds Evidence Of Recent Liquid On Pluto’s Surface
[NASA] “Pluto never stops surprising us,” said Alan Stern, principal investigator of New Horizons and lead study author from the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado. “In addition to suggesting that liquids have recently expressed themselves on Pluto’s surface, this result also suggests a new kind of time-variable feature on Pluto.” The Sputnik Planitia is…
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Life Detection In The Martian Subsurface: Advancements In Microbial Metabolic Research Under Mars Laboratory And Field-Analog Conditions Since Viking
[Astrobiology (Journal)] Following the Viking experiments in 1976, many of the original inferences of biological…
Offworld Microbiology: Staphylococcus Aureus Biofilm Studies
[NASA] Preflight image of Syto9 staining of Staphylococcus aureus biofilm as part of ODYSSEY, an…
High Solubility Of Water In Post-perovskite And Bridgmanite In The Earth’s Deep Lower Mantle
[physics.geo-ph] Water in the Earth’s mantle induces melting, giving rise to strong chemical heterogeneity, and…
A JWST Study of Stardust. I. Infrared Spectroscopy of Comet 81P/Wild 2 and Overall Composition
[astro-ph.EP] We report observations of comet 81P/Wild 2, target of the Stardust sample return mission,…
Gelato: A Mission Concept for Comet Surface Sample Return
[The Planetary Science Journal] Understanding the role of comets in solar system formation and evolution…
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
Development Of A Data Retrieval Algorithm For Venus Nephelometry In Preparation For The Rocket Lab Mission To Venus
[Science Direct] The Rocket Lab Mission to Venus (RLMV) will carry a single primary instrument, the Autofluorescence Nephelometer (AFN), to interpret atmospheric particle properties from light-scattering measurements. This process is fundamentally limited by degeneracy, i.e., multiple combinations of particle size and refractive index can produce indistinguishable intensities. The broad degeneracy of scattered polarized intensities for…
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IMPRESS: A Planetary Penetrator Network for Astrobiology, Prospecting, and Exploration of Mars
[Astrobiology (Journal)] The International Mars Prospecting Ride-Share System (IMPRESS) is presented here as a scalable, democratized, and low-cost mission architecture for distributed measurements on the…
Small-Scale Mineral And Microbial Heterogeneities Near A Fumarole At The Furnas Hydrothermal Zone On The Azores
[Life (Basel)]. The Azores are characterized by intense volcanic activity, creating unique environments such as fumarole sites, where geothermal gases and high temperatures drive distinct…
Microorganisms Actively Shape Earth’s Ocean Floor
[MARUM]. In August 2023, the German research vessel METEOR set sail on Expedition M192 to the Greek island of Milos with Dr. Solveig Bühring as…
Imaging & Spectroscopy
Chemical Modelling Of Interstellar MgS
[astro-ph.GA] The detection of magnesium sulphide (MgS) and sodium sulphide (NaS) towards the Galactic Center molecular cloud G+0.693 constitutes the first detection of metal sulphides…
Proba-3 Views Its Coronagraph – And Our Home World
[ESA]. At first glance, this is just another image of Earth. But look closely, and you will be able to make out Proba-3’s Coronagraph spacecraft…
Probing Primordial Chirality in the Matter Distribution
[astro-ph.CO] Whether parity symmetry was violated in the early universe remains one of the fundamental open questions in cosmology. If so, it may leave an…
Biosignatures & Paleobiology
Degradation, Osmosis and the Emergence of Basic Functionalities in Abiotic Synthetic Life-like Chemical Systems
[Life] Autonomous and interconnected multiscale out-of-equilibrium processes, including chemical and physical feedbacks, occur at the micron and lower scales during the heterotrophic synthesis of simple…
Codepoietic Biological Evolution: From The Origin Of Life To Eukaryogenesis
[BioSystems]. Evolution is an intrinsic property of autopoietic systems performing natural computation, which is based on an internal formal self-description representing the arrangement of digital…
Hash Chemistry: Minimal Models for Evolutionary Growth of Complexity
[q-bio.PE] Hash Chemistry is a family of minimalistic evolutionary models in which a deterministic hash function assigns a scalar score to entities of arbitrary size,…