Floods of unimaginable magnitude once washed through Gale Crater on Mars’ equator around 4 billion years ago – a finding that hints at the possibility that life may have existed there, according to data collected by NASA’s Curiosity rover and analyzed in joint project by scientists from Jackson State University, Cornell University, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the University of Hawaii.
Mars once had oceans but is now bone-dry, leaving many to wonder how the water was lost.
Diverse microbes discovered in the clay-rich, shallow soil layers in Chile’s dry Atacama Desert suggest that similar deposits below the Martian surface may contain microorganisms, which could be easily found by future rover missions or landing craft.
Planetary scientists from Brown University have developed a new remote sensing method for studying olivine, a mineral that could help scientists understand the early evolution of the Moon, Mars and other planetary bodies.
A new agreement hopes to speed along a nuclear reactor technology that could be used to fuel deep-space exploration and possibly power human habitats on the Moon or Mars. Los Alamos National Laboratory has signed an agreement to license the “Kilopower” space reactor technology to Space Nuclear Power Corporation (SpaceNukes), also based in Los Alamos, NM.
Humankind’s next giant step may be onto Mars. But before those missions can begin, scientists need to make scores of breakthrough advances, including learning how to grow crops on the red planet.
For the better part of a decade, an extraordinary tool aboard NASA’s Curiosity rover has been investigating the chemical building blocks of life and making exciting discoveries about Mars’ habitability.
While scientists are eager to study the red planet’s soils for signs of life, researchers must ponder a considerable new challenge: Acidic fluids – which once flowed on the Martian surface – may have destroyed biological evidence hidden within Mars’ iron-rich clays, according to researchers at Cornell University and at Spain’s Centro de Astrobiología.
Electrifying research by Clemson University scientists could lead to the creation of lighter, faster-charging batteries suitable for powering a spacesuit, or even a Mars rover.
When NASA’s Perseverance rover lands on Mars in February after its seven-month-long journey, the mission will only just be beginning.
Today, Mars is an arid, dusty, and frigid landscape with an average temperature of minus 80 degrees Fahrenheit—inhospitable to life as we know it. But it wasn’t always that way.
To have dependable power to explore the the frigid surface of Mars, NASA’s Perseverance rover is equipped with a type of power system called a radioisotope thermoelectric generator (RTG)—which is what the latest episode of Mars Technica will tell listeners all about.
NASA’s new Perseverance rover, which just started its seven-month journey to Mars, carries on board what is likely the most versatile instrument ever created to understand the planet’s past habitability: SuperCam—and a new podcast will tell listeners all about it.
Could Jezero Crater hold the keys to unlocking an ancient and hidden past when life might have existed on the Martian surface?
Mars 2020 will be the first NASA mission that uses ORNL-produced plutonium-238, the first U.S.-produced Pu-238 in three decades. ORNL's Pu-238 will help power Perseverance across the Red Planet's surface.
By: Bill Wellock | Published: July 27, 2020 | 2:27 pm | SHARE: This summer, NASA’s Perseverance rover mission will begin its exploration of Mars, gathering valuable data that will help scientists understand our neighboring planet.Once on Mars, the rover will search for signs of ancient microscopic life and collect data about the planet’s geology and climate.
When NASA’s Perseverance rover launches from Florida on its way to Mars, it will carry aboard what is likely the most versatile instrument ever made to better understand the Red Planet’s past habitability.
Emerging space businesses will drive new innovations in the accounting needed to provide an accurate picture of operations, says an associate professor of accounting at The University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) who has written a paper examining commerce in space.
Silver, bug-eyed extraterrestrials zooming across the cosmos in bullet-speed spaceships. Green, oval-faced creatures hiding out in a secret fortress at Nevada’s Area 51 base. Cartoonish, throaty-voiced relatives of Marvin the Martian who don armor and Spartan-style helmets. We humans are fascinated with the possibility of life on the Red Planet.
The Weizmann Institute's Prof. Oded Aharonson found that ancient ice holds magnetic particles. The finding could shed greater light on the Earth’s magnetic field reversals, supplement magnetic field data from rocks and sediment, and identify field reversals on other bodies in our Solar System, such as Mars.
This paper — from the group that previously examined Martian dust storms — shifts focus to the electrochemical processes resulting from dust storms that may power the movement of chlorine, which is ongoing on Mars today. The research was published May 28 in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets.
A Southwest Research Institute scientist modeled the atmosphere of Mars to help determine that salty pockets of water present on the Red Planet are likely not habitable by life as we know it on Earth.
Science aboard an Alabama Space Grant Consortium (ASGC) student-led cube satellite mission called AEGIS could be valuable to developing future human outposts on the moon and in space travel to Mars if NASA gives the go-ahead for a 2022 flight.
By studying how the tiniest organisms in the Atacama Desert of Chile, one of the driest places on Earth, extract water from rocks, researchers at the Johns Hopkins University, University of California, Irvine, and U.C. Riverside revealed how, against all odds, life can exist in extreme environments.
A research team including research scientist Atsuko Kobayashi from the Earth-Life Science Institute (ELSI) at Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan and research scientist Mizuho Koike from the Institute of Space and Astronautical Science at Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, have found nitrogen-bearing organic material in carbonate minerals in a Martian meteorite.
Newly discovered single-celled creatures living deep beneath the seafloor have given researchers clues about how they might find life on Mars. These bacteria were discovered living in tiny cracks inside volcanic rocks after researchers persisted over a decade of trial and error to find a new way to examine the rocks.
If humans ever hope to colonize Mars, the settlers will need to manufacture on-planet a huge range of organic compounds, from fuels to drugs, that are too expensive to ship from Earth.
Organic compounds called thiophenes are found on Earth in coal, crude oil and oddly enough, in white truffles, the mushroom beloved by epicureans and wild pigs.
More than a year after NASA’s Mars InSight lander touched down in a pebble-filled crater on the Martian equator, the rusty red planet is now serving up its meteorological secrets: gravity waves, surface swirling “dust devils,” and the steady, low rumble of infrasound, Cornell and other researchers have found.
On 26 November 2018, the NASA InSight lander successfully set down on Mars in the Elysium Planitia region.
Presently, Earth is the only known location where life exists in the Universe. This year the Nobel Prize in physics was awarded to three astronomers who proved, almost 20 years ago, that planets are common around stars beyond the solar system.
Northern Arizona University professor Christopher Edwards and postdoc Jennifer Buz are co-authors of a study published this week in Geophysical Research Letters that mapped several locations on Mars at high and mid-latitudes where water ice exists at a depth as little as an inch below the planet’s surface.
Six scientists from the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have been named Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).
NASA has a research grant with The University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) to model how a spacecraft might be engineered to work with nuclear thermal propulsion (NTP), en route to an eventual test flight.
Next year, NASA plans to launch a new Mars rover to search for signs of ancient life on the Red Planet.
Geologist Kathy Benison has been selected for NASA's Mars 2020 team.
Scientists from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab want to know more about the potential harmful effects of organic contamination on space exploration hardware and how to prevent it. They will talk about their research at the 66th annual AVS International Symposium and Exhibition. JPL scientist Martin Maxwell will present a session on how increased sensitivity of instruments and missions calls for an update in outdated contamination procedures.
People have spent centuries wondering whether life exists beyond Earth, but only recently have scientists developed the tools to find out.
The surface of Mars was once home to shallow, salty ponds that went through episodes of overflow and drying, according to a paper published today in Nature Geoscience.
The first international mission in the University of North Dakota’s Inflatable Mars/Lunar Habitat (IMLH) was launched Wednesday afternoon when four students from Argentina, Colombia, Mexico and Peru entered the facility to spend two weeks running experiments to help NASA with exploring the moon and Mars.
Washington State University scientists have developed a way to triple the shelf life of ready-to-eat macaroni and cheese, a development that could have benefits for everything from space travel to military use.
Wind erosion has been ruled out as the primary cause of methane gas release on Mars, Newcastle University academics have shown.
BIDMC researchers report that a daily moderate dose of resveratrol significantly preserved muscle function and mitigated muscle atrophy in an animal model mimicking Mars’ partial gravity. Novel model innovated by BIDMC researchers will help scientists fill in the blanks about the little understood physiological consequences of partial gravity.
With NASA planning to revisit the lunar surface by 2024 and send multiple expeditions by 2028, Rutgers University’s Haym Benaroya is optimistic that people will someday live on the moon. Benaroya, a distinguished professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Rutgers University–New Brunswick, has spent most of his career focusing on lunar settlement and space exploration issues.
RSS
Medicine keyboard_arrow_right
Sciencekeyboard_arrow_right
Life keyboard_arrow_right
Business keyboard_arrow_right
Journal News keyboard_arrow_right
By Location keyboard_arrow_right
Meetings, Grants, and Events keyboard_arrow_right