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Complex Water Systems Revealed On Early Mars
[NASA] A new study reveals that Jezero Crater’s enigmatic ‘Margin Unit’ was shaped by a complex sequence of ancient lakes, groundwater systems, and hydrothermal fluids. When NASA’s Perseverance rover reached the inner edge of Mars’ Jezero Crater in September 2023, mission scientists were surprised by what they found. Called the “Margin Unit,” the geologic area…
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An Accidental Impact Crater Discovery
[NASA]. There are roughly 200 confirmed impact structures on Earth, but geologists estimate that hundreds…
The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope Coronagraph Community Participation Program
[astro-ph.IM]. In preparation for the operational phase of the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, NASA…
Unveiling Microbial Communities And Biogeochemical Cycles In Antarctic Colored Snow
[BMC Microbiology]. Snow cover, the extensive terrestrial habitat in Antarctica, sometimes exhibits vivid coloration, yet…
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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Atmospheres, Climate, Weather
Decoding The Weather On Brown Dwarf SIMP 0136
[Trinity College Dublin] Scientists from Trinity College Dublin have developed a powerful way to unravel the changing weather patterns on distant worlds. Using this approach, they discovered that the weather on a well-studied brown dwarf, “SIMP 0136”, previously linked with Northern Lights-like phenomena, is largely shaped by just two dominant processes: changes in temperature and…
Read moreExploration Gear & Tech
Tricorder Tech: New Handheld Device Maps Chemical Composition Using Infrared Light
[Optica] Researchers have developed a compact, handheld mid-infrared imaging spectrometer that can produce high-resolution chemical maps of a sample without using any stains or labels.…
Water Planet Recon: How Accurately Can We Measure Earth Ocean’s Deepest Point?
[Research Organization of Information and Systems]. How deep is the deepest ocean—and how precisely can we actually measure it? Bathymetric maps obtained by each sounding…
Deep Learning of SHERLOC Raman Spectra For Facilitating Mars Astromaterial Identification
[Spectrochimica Acta Part A: Molecular and Biomolecular Spectroscopy] Raman spectroscopy has been explored for planetary exploration, particularly through the SHERLOC instrument for Mars habitability and…
Imaging & Spectroscopy
Youngest Exoplanet Yet Discovered Found Hiding in Keck Observatory Data
[W.M.Keck Observatory] Astronomers have confirmed the youngest exoplanet detected so far, offering a rare glimpse into the earliest stages of planetary formation. The planet, known…
Glycine In The Interstellar Medium Revisited: Resolving Conformational Complexity Kinetically
[astro-ph.GA] Numerous attempts to detect glycine, a simple amino acid and a key building block of proteins in all life on Earth, in the interstellar…
How Small is Large Enough? Determining Minimal Cluster Sizes for Molecule Adsorption on Interstellar Amorphous Ice
[astro-ph.GA] Binding energies of molecules on ice mantles are important to understand the evolution of molecular complexity in molecular clouds. Binding energies are often computed…
Biosignatures & Paleobiology
PlainMap: A Lightweight, Restartable Mapping Pipeline For Ancient And Modern DNA
[q-bio.GN] Mapping sequencing reads to a reference genome requires preprocessing and alignment choices that can vary with library type, fragment length, sequencing platform, and reference…
Deep Shifts In Evolutionary Rate Trajectories Of Ancient Bacterial Genes
[biorxiv.org] Reconstruction of ancestral gene repertoires from extant genomes captures only the genes that survived; those lost from the record are invisible. Among the genes…
Spectral Evolution Of Ceres’ Surface and Implications For Space Weathering
[astro-ph.EP] The surface of Ceres exposed to the space environment will be gradually altered, but the evolution of its spectral properties remains poorly understood. Here…