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UKs Key Habitable Worlds Observatory Instrument In NASA’s Hunt For Earth-like Worlds
[Royal Astronomical Society] UK astronomers are a step closer to playing a leading role in NASA’s search for alien life in the coming decades, after receiving £3million to continue developing one of the core instruments of the Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO). The “exciting” mission – the US space agency’s next flagship space telescope after the…
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50 Years After Viking 1: The Mission That Changed The Search For Life On Mars
[SETI Institute] For thousands of years, Mars has inspired myths, speculation and scientific curiosity. Fifty…
Offworld Science Training: From Lava Fields To Antarctica, Students Pave The Way For Artemis Moon Missions
[University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa] The Artemis missions will return human beings to the surface…
Cliffs Of Ice On Mars
[NASA/UA HiRISE] The mid-latitudes of Mars are mostly covered with smooth material that scientists have…
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…
Planetesimal Formation Across the Stellar Mass Spectrum and its Influence on Exoplanet-Inherited Volatile Budgets
[astro-ph.EP] Protoplanetary discs emerging from collapsing molecular clouds are capable of forming planetesimals at the…
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
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
Pinpointing Where Cells First Begin Copying DNA
[Medical Research Council (MRC) Laboratory of Medical Sciences] Every time a cell divides, it must faithfully copy its entire genetic instruction manual. Errors during this…
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…
Substrate-Agnostic 3x: Biosignatures, Technosignatures, Ecologies
[physics.gen-ph] Substrate-agnostic perspectives are currently attracting increased attention. For example, it has become customary to refer to agnostic biosignatures to reflect the range of alternative…