In the whole history of Earth’s climate, few events are as extreme as those that geologists call “Snowball Earth.”
Investigating the survival limits of extremophilic microorganisms exposed to simulated space conditions can shed light on the ability of terrestrial microorganisms to survive and propagate on other planetary bodies.
Analog environments are terrestrial environments that resemble extraterrestrial sites; this concept originated in space sciences for defining methods to study planetary geology, training for missions and testing research instruments.
Results from the solar-powered spacecraft provide a new measurement of the thickness of the ice shell encasing the Jovian moon’s ocean.
A recent study by geophysicists at Washington State University offers insight into how nutrients may reach the subsurface ocean of Europa, one of Jupiter’s moons and a leading candidate for […]
While Io, the most volcanically active moon in the solar system, appears completely dry and devoid of water ice, its neighbor Europa is thought to harbor a vast global ocean […]
Small aromatic molecules, including functionalized derivatives of benzene, are known to be present throughout the different stages of star and planet formation. In particular, oxygen-bearing monosubstituted aromatics, likely including phenol, […]
The Galilean moons of Io, Europa, and Ganymede exhibit a 4:2:1 commensurability in their mean motions, a configuration known as the Laplace resonance.
The giant planet Jupiter has nearly 100 known moons, yet none have captured the interest and imagination of astronomers and space scientists quite like Europa, an ice-shrouded world that is […]
The Cassini spacecraft orbited Saturn from 2004 to 2017, performing over a hundred flybys of Titan, Saturn’s largest moon.
