[RAS Philosophical Transactions A] The discovery of subsurface oceans in the icy moons of the giant planets has revealed the potential presence of deep habitats, despite very cold surface conditions.
[ESA] The European Space Agency’s Jupiter Icy Moons Explorer (Juice) will return to Earth on 28 September, with flight controllers guiding the spacecraft close to our home planet to alter […]
![(Top) Measured OC albedo values from Goldstone (from Table 4) and (bottom) measured OC albedo values from the GBT (from Table 5). The horizontal dashed lines indicate the weighted means of the albedos, which is 0.90 for Goldstone and 0.80 for GBT. The error bars on our albedo values are taken to be the total uncertainty calculated in Section 4. The color bar on the right shows the dates of our observations in YYMMDD. The x-axis is the subradar point west longitude. -- [astro-ph.EP]](https://i0.wp.com/astrobiology.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/Radar-observations.png?resize=1200%2C751&ssl=1)
[astro-ph.EP] Three of Jupiter’s Galilean satellites – Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto – are of particular scientific interest due to their icy shells and suspected subsurface oceans. However, the radar properties […]
![The band depths and centers of Callisto’s CO2 as measured at 4.25 µm for three viewing geometries. The trailing hemisphere and Asgard-centered data were previously published by Cartwright et al. (2024). The following geologic units are marked with symbols: Valhalla, ⋆ ; Asgard, ◦; Lofn/Heimdall, △. The sub-observer longitude of the observation is indicated in the panels. The projected angular size of Callisto varies slightly between each observation, so the spaxel scale is slightly different in each panel. The typical uncertainty in the band depth is ± 0.4%, while the band center is ±0.0006µm -- [astro-ph.EP]](https://i0.wp.com/astrobiology.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/Callisto.png?resize=1200%2C709&ssl=1)
[astro-ph.EP] We present maps of H2O, CO2, and a 4.57 um spectral feature across Callisto’s surface observed using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).
[astro-ph.EP] Io, Europa and Ganymede are locked in the well-known Laplace resonance, while Callisto is not, even though it is very close to the 7:3 mean motion resonance with Ganymede. […]
A team of scientists has used NASA’s Goldstone Solar System Radar and the U.S. National Science Foundation Green Bank Telescope (NSF GBT) to carry out the most extensive radar study […]
Jupiter’s moon Ganymede is the largest moon in the solar system; at over 3,200 miles across, it is larger than the planet Mercury. It is also the only moon with […]
The surface and subsurface of worlds beyond Mars remain largely unexplored. Yet these worlds hold keys to fundamental questions in planetary science – from potentially habitable subsurface oceans on icy […]
![Artist’s impression of the simulations conducted in this research. Jupiter (lower left) has a strong magnetic field which creates a cavity in its circumplanetary disk. Saturn (upper right) lacks a strong magnetic field so its circumplanetary disk evolves without a cavity. Credit: Yuri I. Fujii/L-INSIGHT [Kyoto University], Illustrator: Shinichiro Kinoshita](https://i0.wp.com/astrobiology.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/How-Jupiter-Cultivated.png?resize=1200%2C717&ssl=1)
The two largest planets in our Solar System, Jupiter and Saturn, also have the largest satellite systems, or the most moons. At present, Jupiter’s reported moon count stands at more […]
Southwest Research Institute was part of an international team that demonstrated how complex organic molecules (COMs), key chemical precursors to life, could have been incorporated into Jupiter’s Galilean moons during […]
