Ancient Antarctic microbial mats harbour viable bacteria that have been exposed to extreme cold and arid conditions for hundreds of years.
The ongoing exploration of planets such as Mars is producing a wealth of data to define habitable environments beyond the Earth.
Beneath the deep sea at nearly 10,000 meters, a Chinese-led team has discovered vibrant communities of marine creatures that survive without sunlight, relying instead on chemical reactions for energy.
Editor’s note: When we start to mount Astrobiology missions to explore ocean worlds we’ll need ways for our robotic submersibles to observe and interat with whatever life forms they may […]
Gossans are formed through the oxidation of sulfide ore deposits by fluids, such as meteoric water or hydrothermal solutions, leading to locally acidic conditions.
Viruses in the cold waters of the Arctic are strongly seasonal and are also detected in the Antarctic.
A draft genome sequence was assembled and annotated for an uncultured archaeon reconstructed from shotgun metagenomes obtained from Antarctic endoliths.
Editor’s note: Astronaut Thomas Pesquet carries out investigations with the spectrometer associated with the ESA Electronic FieldBook
![Estimated sampleability efficiency for Nightingale (left) and Osprey (right) [12]. Blue indicates high efficiency while red indicates low efficiency. The tan circle denotes the area that contained 98.3% of Monte Carlo cases while the blue circle contained 80%. -- astro-ph.EP](https://i0.wp.com/astrobiology.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/OSIRIS-REx-Operational-Key.png?resize=1200%2C721&ssl=1)
OSIRIS-REx, NASA’s first asteroid sample return mission, rendezvoused with the near-Earth asteroid Bennu in 2018 and delivered a 121.6-gram sample to Earth in 2023, the largest amount of material ever […]
Shown here is an annotated composite image of the interiors of the 33 tubes NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover has used to collect samples as of July 24, 2025, the 1,574th […]
