Space News & Blog Articles

NASA's MSL Curiosity rover has found some more pieces of the puzzle that is Mars' ancient habitability. Evidence that the planet was once warm, wet, and habitable is growing, and now Curiosity has detected some new organic molecules. The rover found 21 organic compounds in rocks in Gale Crater with its Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instrument. Seven of them were detected for the first time.

The dependable Hubble Space Telescope has been in orbit for more than 35 years now. It's at a point where it can reexamine objects it observed decades ago and can uncover changes that have transpired over human timescales. This is an impressive feat for a telescope that was projected to last only 15 years.

Scientists have been debating for decades whether Mars once held a vast ocean covering a large part of its northern face. To prove the idea, they’ve been looking for a “bathtub ring” - a distinct, level shoreline that shows where water once stood. But, despite years of looking, they’ve only been able to find a very distorted potential shoreline whose height deviates by several kilometers - not exactly great evidence of a stable water level. But, according to a new paper in Nature from Abdallah Zaki and Michael Lamb of CalTech, what scientists should have been looking for wasn’t a bathtub ring, but a continental shelf.

The search for life beyond Earth has traditionally focused on exoplanets orbiting Sun-like stars, which is a G-type star. However, low-mass stars, which are designated as K-type and M-type stars, have rapidly become a target for astrobiology, primarily due to their much longer lifetimes. This also means the habitable zone (HZ), which is the distance from a star where liquid water could exist, is much smaller than our solar system’s HZ, and is referred to as the liquid water habitable zone (LW-HZ). In contrast, another type of HZ that involves a star’s ultraviolet (UV) radiation potentially enabling life-harboring conditions is known as UV-HZ.

As we make our way through the latest solar maximum period, scholars and scientists are looking to similar events in the past to learn more about ancient bouts of solar activity. In particular, they want to know more about solar proton events (SPEs). These outbursts of high-energy particles get triggered by flares and coronal mass ejections.