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AbGradCon Outreach Hints
Editor’s note: As I mentioned in an earlier post last month, the prime reason for being at AdGradCon – Astrobiology Graduate Conference – (https://abgradcon.org) is to focus on – AbGradCon. But, as you know, sharing what you have learned, your enthusiasm for the topic, and your interest in helping advance the discipline of Astrobiology are…
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AstroFetch: AI-powered Exoplanet Assistant
[NASA Exoplanet Archive] We’re excited to announce that AstroFetch, an AI-powered assistant that answers natural-language…
Assessing the Impact of High-Resolution Imaging on Statistical Validation of TESS Planet Candidates
[astro-ph.EP] High-resolution imaging is widely used to constrain false-positive scenarios in exoplanet validation, but it…
Exoplanet System Architecture: Sculpting the Inner Regions
[astro-ph.EP] In this study, we seek to improve our understanding of the competing roles of…
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
Cosmic Radiation at Flight Altitudes Rises When the Sun Is Less Active
[Hebrew University of Jerusalem]. Radiation from space is constantly entering Earth’s atmosphere, but how much of it reaches the altitudes used by commercial aircraft depends not only on height and location, but also on the activity of the Sun. A new study based on high-altitude balloon measurements over southern Israel has mapped these changes through…
Read moreExploration Gear & Tech
SkyFall Astrogeology/Astrobiology Droids Will Survey Mars
[NASA]. Equipped with four instruments each, the three SkyFall Mars helicopters helicopters will follow in the footsteps of the agency’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter, a technology…
Alta-X Drone Tests Future Astrobiology / Astrogeology Droid Technology
[NASA]. An Alta-X drone flies an advanced guidance and navigation system known as the Safe and Precise Landing – Integrated Capabilities Evolution (SPLICE) experiment. The…
Rethinking The Origin Of Life At Seafloor Hydrothermal Vents
[PNAS] Alkaline vents have dominated a class of hypotheses for the origins of life since their discovery a quarter of century ago, but advances in…
Imaging & Spectroscopy
Mars Rover Curiosity’s Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI) Calibration
[NASA]. NASA’s Mars rover Curiosity acquired this image using its Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI), located on the turret at the end of the rover’s…
SwRI Simulations Indicate That Large Impacts May Limit Ocean Formation In Icy Moons
[SwRI] Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) scientists provided simulations to understand the role disruptive impacts play on icy moons with subsurface oceans in our solar system.…
NASA Administrator Visits Dragonfly Mass Spectrometer (DraMS)
[NASA]. Dragonfly will explore sites of interest around Titan’s equatorial regions and collect samples of surface material for analysis inside DraMS, the Dragonfly Mass Spectrometer.…
Biosignatures & Paleobiology
A Genomic Catalog Of Earth’s Bacterial And Archaeal Symbionts
[Nature Biotechnology] Microbial symbiosis drives the functional and phylogenomic diversification of life on Earth yet remains underexplored because of culturing challenges. This study used machine…
Structure Of An RNA polymerase Ribozyme Replication Complex
[biorxiv.org] Life began with the emergence of a molecule that could replicate its own genetic material, a task plausibly mediated by an RNA-dependent RNA polymerase…
The Long-term Persistence Of Microbial Biospheres Introduces A Temporal Bias 1 Into The Drake Equation: Implications For The Search For Extraterrestrial Life
[eartharxiv.org] The Drake equation was designed to estimate the number of communicative technological civilisations, not the prevalence of life. Its lifetime term therefore describes a…