The agency’s six-wheeled geologist took a self-portrait during its survey of an ancient landscape that may predate the formation of Jezero Crater itself.
Electromagnetic (EM) sounding can constrain the electrical structure of Enceladus and, in turn, the salinity of its ocean and the porosity, fluid content, and thermal state of its hydrothermally active […]
A new study by Earth scientists in the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) offers an explanation for one of Earth’s great climate puzzles: how […]
This observation features a plateau adjacent to subsiding terrain in Xanthe Terra, possibly traversed by a fault.
The Science Discovery Engine (SDE), NASA’s centralized, search capability for all open-source science data and information, recently released a major upgrade to its backend infrastructure. Shifting to OpenSearch, an Amazon […]
Magma ocean crystallisation sets up the early structure and long-term evolution of terrestrial planets. Recent seismic evidence signals the presence of a silicate layer at the base of Mars’ mantle.
Unlike most similar emanations described to date, this one shows no evidence of methane emission or consumption. The absence of this molecule and its abundance of sulfur make it a […]
Using MIRI (Mid Infrared Instrument) on board the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), a team of researchers led by former MPIA (Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, Heidelberg, Germany) PhD student […]
![The measured planet-to-star flux ratio as a function of wavelength compared to a range of solid slab surfaces. The observations were taken using Spitzer (blue square-shaped marker) and JWST (red circle-shaped markers). The error bars on the data are 1σ. A selection of models, taken from Ref. [12], represent solid slab surfaces with varying compositions. Solid orange line: an ultramafic, olivine clinopyroxenite EG-19-63 sample (∼ 47 wt% SiO2) recovered from Emigrant Gap, California, USA, which shows good agreement with the observations. Dashed blue line: a mafic, basaltic sample from the 1919 Kilauea eruption in Hawaii, USA (∼ 51 wt% SiO2) that is also consistent with the data. Dashed, dotted green line: a felsic sample representing the highest SiO2 content model (∼ 73 wt% SiO2) published in Ref. [12]. The legend lists the rejection significances of these models. With a solid black line, we also show a 1000 K black body curve for the planet, which is the best fit value using the combined Spitzer and JWST dataset. -- astro-ph.EP](https://i0.wp.com/astrobiology.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/The-dark-and-featureless.png?resize=1200%2C721&ssl=1)
JWST has opened a new era in the study of rocky exoplanets, enabling direct characterization of their surfaces with mid-infrared spectroscopy. Different types of rock have distinct spectral features that […]
Rock-dwelling chlorolichens and cyanobacteria provide most of the total biomass of the ice-free zone of Antarctica, i.e., the McMurdo Dry Valleys (MDV), and yet, the water sources of MDV are […]
