Space

Now that Philae has woken up, we may be on the brink of a major step forward in our understanding of comets, and we expect to find some interesting chemistry. Perhaps 30% of its composition consists of organics, and now we'll be able to look at it close up. Why, though, do most scientists expect to find only pre-biotic chemistry? Is there any chance of finding life? Also, where else can we look for life and prebiotic chemistry in the solar system?  So far, the only place we have searched is Mars, and our search for life there is very much in the early stages. Recently we have started to…

The ancient oceans of Jupiter's Europa and Saturn's tiny Enceladus are hidden beneath an ice sheet kilometers thick. They may have ET microbes, even multicellular swimming creatures around hydrothermal vents. Or they could have imperfectly reproducing "protocells"; a window into the first stages of evolution.  These conditions, which make them so habitable, and interesting for astrobiology, may also make them especially vulnerable to invasive species. Cassini orbiter found geysers at the south pole of Enceladus, continually venting sea water from its ocean into space, as ice…

The ancient oceans of Jupiter's Europa and Saturn's tiny Enceladus are hidden beneath an ice sheet kilometers thick. They may have ET microbes, even multicellular swimming creatures around hydrothermal vents. Or they could have imperfectly reproducing "protocells"; a window into the first stages of evolution.  These conditions, which make them so habitable, and interesting for astrobiology, may also make them especially vulnerable to invasive species. Cassini orbiter found geysers at the south pole of Enceladus, continually venting sea water from its ocean into space, as ice…

If an extraterrestrial race - or indeed later civilization on the Earth looks at the relics of our space explorations - one thing they might notice is our fondness for placing flags and pennants in space. All the space faring nations have signed the Outer Space Treaty. So these are not claims of territory (forbidden by the treaty) but rather, celebrations of national pride and accomplishment. This photograph shows the deployed Apollo EASEP package - with the Stars and Stripes. What you might not know is that Buzz Aldrin also placed a graffiti Union Jack on the Moon (without realizing it)…

The ESO's Very Large Telescope has revealed what appears to be an aging star giving birth to a butterfly-like planetary nebula. These observations of the red giant star L2 Puppis, from the ZIMPOL mode of the newly installed SPHERE instrument, also clearly showed a close stellar companion.  At about 200 light-years away, L2 Puppis is one of the closest red giants to Earth known to be entering its final stages of life. The new observations with the ZIMPOL mode of SPHERE were made in visible light using extreme adaptive optics, which corrects images to a much higher degree than standard…

Elon Musk, and NASA both have in mind the idea of doing interplanetary voyages straight away, aiming for Mars, with Obama going so far as to say about the Moon: “But I just have to say pretty bluntly here: We’ve been there before.”. If you hold that view, you are undoubtedly in distinguished company. Now - there are two things here - yes we've been to the Moon before - but is that the end of all interest in it? But first - how ready are we for interplanetary voyages?  We last visited the Moon, nearly four hundred thousand kilometers away, in the 1970s. Since then we have been shuttling…

The present day habitability of Mars is an area of research that has exploded hugely in the last decade, to the extent that it's often hard to keep track of everything that's going on. This is by way of background material for my other articles on habitability of Mars. Here you can read in detail about many new ideas in this rapidly expanding field. From the salty seeps in the warm seasonal flows to the liquid layers in polar ice that may create the flow like features. From the suggestion that we may find ice fumaroles on Mars almost the same in temperature as their surroundings to the idea…

 Researchers have used satellite data to detect deposits of glass within impact craters on Mars. Though formed in the searing heat of a violent impact, the glasses just might provide a delicate window into the possibility of past life on the Red Planet. Over the last few years, several research groups have shown that, here on Earth, ancient biosignatures can be preserved in impact glass. One of those studies, led by Brown geologist Peter Schultz and published last year, found organic molecules and even plant matter entombed in glass formed by an impact that occurred millions of years ago…

I've talked before about how life on present day Mars could be vulnerable to Earth life. If only humans could be sterilized of other life, like a plant seed. But sadly, we can't do that, and it would kill us to try. Recent ideas, and experiments in Mars simulation chambers suggest that there may be liquid water habitats on the surface of Mars, maybe just a few mm scale droplets of water, but places where life could survive. And humans can't go anywhere without taking hundreds of thousands of microbe hitchhikers along with us. So - if we can't go to the surface of Mars right away - where can…

Our Earth is the only planet we know with life visible from orbit. But conditions elsewhere n the solar system are so harsh, you'd expect the life to be hidden from view, sheltered from UV light, and cosmic radiation, and from the vacuum or near vacuum conditions, as I explored in Our Spacecraft Could Look Straight At an Extraterrestrial Microbe - And Not See a Thing!. Also there were times in the past when even Earth went through a snowball or slushball phase when it may also have looked lifeless from orbit, or nearly so, yet life here survived through that. Similarly though the…