[Photochemistry and Photobiology] Experiments conducted in Low Earth Orbit (LEO) since the 1990s have investigated the evolution of organic matter in solid-phase (including amino acids) under solar photon irradiation to […]
Biosignatures & Paleobiology
Posted inTitan
A Review Of The Geochemical Environment at Selk Crater on Titan: Applications to Dragonfly
[Astrobiology (Journal)] This article summarizes the current state of knowledge regarding the destination for NASA’s Dragonfly mission: Titan’s Selk crater.
![Pressures determined by ruby fluorescence measurements at different locations within the sample chamber: (a) during powder compaction, (b) after decompression. No ruby fluorescence spectrum was obtained on the sphere marked with an asterisk, likely due to insufficient Cr doping, resulting in an undetectable fluorescence signal. -- [astro-ph.EP]](https://i0.wp.com/astrobiology.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/Elastic.png?resize=1200%2C720&ssl=1)
Posted inTitan
Elastic Properties of Titan Tholins Revealed by Brillouin Spectroscopy
[astro-ph.EP] Titan tholins, complex organic solids synthesized by simulating photochemical processes in Titan’s atmosphere, are widely regarded as analogs to organic surface materials on the Saturnian moon.
Posted inExoplanets, -moons, -comets
Ultraviolet Reflected-Light Spectroscopy of Modern Earth Analogs with Starshade Observations
[astro-ph.EP] Characterizing rocky, habitable zone planets in reflected light is a key science objective for future direct imaging missions, and the ultraviolet (UV) is uniquely suited for supporting the characterization […]
Posted inMars
A Proposal To Make Mars Sample Return A Collaborative NASA, ESA, And CNSA Effort
[Astrobiology (Journal) via PubMed] Humanity’s self-awareness drives the quest to understand the origins of life. Although Earth history has erased much of our planet’s early biological evidence, Mars preserves ancient […]
![Set Transformer actor–critic architecture used by the RL policy. The input candidate set 𝑋 ∈ R 𝑁×𝐹 is first projected into a latent 𝑑-dimensional representation and processed by 𝐿 Induced Set Attention Blocks (ISABs). Learned inducing tokens provide the queries in the first attention operation of each ISAB, after which information is redistributed to the candidate tokens. The actor combines each contextualised target representation with the global mission state to produce one logit per available observation. Each logit is then converted into a probability to select a corresponding observation. The critic uses Pooling by Multihead Attention (PMA) to obtain a permutation-invariant summary of the candidate set, which is combined with the same global state to estimate 𝑉 (𝑠). -- [astro-ph.EP]](https://i0.wp.com/astrobiology.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/aRieL-Reinforcement.png?resize=1200%2C715&ssl=1)
Posted inAriel Mission
aRieL – Reinforcement Learning For The Ariel Space Telescope Scheduling
[astro-ph.EP] The Ariel mission will conduct a population level survey of hundreds of exoplanet atmospheres, requiring observations to be scheduled across a large and diverse catalogue of potential targets.
Posted inAstronomy & Telescopes
Call For White Papers On Multi-Cycle Treasury Concepts With JWST
[ESA Hubble] STScI has issued a call for White Papers for compelling scientific ideas for Multi-Cycle Treasury (MCT) programmes that require large allocations of JWST time to complete.
![[Left]: A concept raytrace showing the IFS, with just the FUV channels shown. The NUV channels take the zero-order from each FUV grating and reflect it towards the IFS fold mirror (on either side) into a similar format NUV IFS (see Haughton et al., 2026 for a depiction of the INFUSE design that this IFS is based on13). The IFS assembly is forward (out of the page) from the MOS at the focal plane, with the IFS fold mirror canted slightly to move the slicer, gratings, and detectors over 0.7 meters from the MOS optical path. [Right]: The slicer-based IFS operates by reflecting portions of the image plane to different gratings, which then focus a spectrogram to a unique portion of the detector. In essence, each reflective slice operates like a long-slit spectrograph, with the slicer geometry separating the multi-slit spectrograph to avoid spectral confusion.-- astro-ph.IM](https://i0.wp.com/astrobiology.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/An-Ultraviolet.png?resize=1200%2C563&ssl=1)
Posted inAstronomy & Telescopes
An Ultraviolet Instrument On The Habitable Worlds Observatory: Considerations and Capability Trades On The Multi-Object, Integral-field, and High-resolution Modes Of A Potential UVI
[astro-ph.IM] The Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO) is NASA’s next-generation astrophysics platform, delivering transformative capability in the search for life and study of the origins of the universe.
![A heterotrophic ecosystem enabled by fermentation on Enceladus. [astro-ph.EP]](https://i0.wp.com/astrobiology.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/Fermentation.png?resize=1200%2C720&ssl=1)
Posted inEnceladus
Fermentation Heterotrophy Can Reproduce Enceladus’s H2 And CH4 Under Limited Serpentinization
[astro-ph.EP] Saturn’s icy moon Enceladus is a prime target in the search for life beyond Earth. Abundant H2 and CH4 in Enceladus’s south-polar plume have been shown to be consistent […]
Posted inSample Return
An Interdisciplinary Approach To Sampling Hard Rock Cores Of The Oceanic Crust For Microbiological And Biogeochemical Research
[Scientific Drilling] Studying life in the deep, rocky subseafloor involves many layers of technological and methodological challenges, and each drilling project or expedition must make a series of choices to […]