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12 Apr 2013 |
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Where Are the Best Windows Into Europa's Interior?
The surface of Jupiter's moon Europa exposes material churned up from inside the moon and also material resulting from matter and energy coming from above. If you want to learn about the deep saltwater ocean beneath this unusual world's icy shell -- as many people do who are interested in possible extraterrestrial life -- you might target your investigation of the surface somewhere that has more of the up-from-below stuff and less of the down-from-above stuff. New analysis of observations made more than a decade ago by NASA's Galileo mission to Jupiter helps identify those places.
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18 Mar 2013 |
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Curiosity Mars Rover Sees Trend in Water Presence
NASA's Mars rover Curiosity has seen evidence of water-bearing minerals in rocks near where it had already found clay minerals inside a drilled rock. Last week, the rover's science team announced that analysis of powder from a drilled mudstone rock on Mars indicates past environmental conditions that were favorable for microbial life. Additional findings presented today (March 18) at a news briefing at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in The Woodlands, Texas, suggest those conditions extended beyond the site of the drilling.
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7 Mar 2013 |
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NASA Helps See Buried Mars Flood Channels In 3-D
NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has provided images allowing scientists for the first time to create a 3-D reconstruction of ancient water channels below the Martian surface.
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5 Mar 2013 |
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A Window into Europa's Ocean Right at the Surface
If you could lick the surface of Jupiter's icy moon Europa, you would actually be sampling a bit of the ocean beneath. A new scientific paper details the strongest evidence yet that salty water from the vast liquid ocean beneath Europa's frozen exterior actually makes its way to the surface.
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21 Feb 2013 |
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Water in Moon Rocks Challenges Lunar Formation Theory
Scientists have recently discovered small traces of water from samples brought back from the Moon by the Apollo 15 mission that took place in the 1970?s. Prevailing theories hold that the Moon was created when a Mars-sized body crashed into the young Earth and broke off debris that eventually coalesced into a new entity. In the process, much of the water would have evaporated into space, leaving Earth's satellite very dry. But the new study has found that the Moon may have once had a watery landscape, turning older theories about the Moon upside down.
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20 Jan 2013 |
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Gorgeous Images: Ancient River on Mars?
The Mars Express has long been taking pictures of what appears to be an ancient riverbed on Mars. In fact, Reull Vallis was one of the first objects on the Red Planet that Mars Express ever imaged back in 2004 when the spacecraft arrived in orbit. The latest images show the sinuous river-like feature that stretches for nearly 1,500 km across the Martian landscape. Planetary scientists seem to be fairly unanimous that, from orbit, this appears to be a riverbed. There is a system of tributaries and side channels that all appear to flow into the huge Hellas Basin.
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20 Jan 2013 |
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Martian Crater May Once Have Held Groundwater-Fed Lake
A NASA spacecraft is providing new evidence of a wet underground environment on Mars that adds to an increasingly complex picture of the Red Planet's early evolution. The new information comes from researchers analyzing spectrometer data from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which looked down on the floor of McLaughlin Crater. The Martian crater is 57 miles (92 kilometers) in diameter and 1.4 miles (2.2 kilometers) deep. McLaughlin's depth apparently once allowed underground water, which otherwise would have stayed hidden, to flow into the crater's interior.
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15 Jan 2013 |
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Curiosity Update, Sol 157: Glenelg Isn't Just a Test Site Anymore; It's a Scientific "Candy Store"
The rock at Glenelg turns out to be a sequence of diverse sedimentary rocks that seem to have been deposited by liquid water, then turned into rock, which was, some time later, saturated again with liquid water, leaving concretions and gypsum veins in their wake. Water, water, everywhere, and at multiple times in history, in multiple depositional environments! It's exactly the kind of stuff Curiosity was sent to Mars to study.
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8 Dec 2012 |
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Ancient Caverns on Mars May Have Captured Floodwaters
An international research team led by the Planetary Science Institute has found evidence that indicates that approximately 2 billion years ago enormous volumes of catastrophic flood discharges may have been captured by extensive systems of caverns on Mars.
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27 Sep 2012 |
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Curiosity Finds Old Streambed on Mars
NASA's Curiosity rover mission has found evidence a stream once ran vigorously across the area on Mars where the rover is driving. There is earlier evidence for the presence of water on Mars, but this evidence -- images of rocks containing ancient streambed gravels -- is the first of its kind.
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26 Sep 2012 |
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Vesta Got Special Delivery of Hydrated Minerals
Observations of the giant asteroid Vesta by NASA's Dawn mission suggest that hydrated materials were delivered to it mainly through a buildup of small particles during an epoch when the solar system was rich in dust. This is a radically different process from the way hydrated materials have been deposited on the moon and may have implications for the formation of terrestrial planets, including the delivery of the water that formed Earth's ocean.
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20 Sep 2012 |
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NASA Dawn Spacecraft Sees Hydrated Minerals on Giant Asteroid
Pothole-like features mark some of Vesta's surface where volatiles (easily evaporated materials), likely water, released from hydrated minerals boiled off. While Dawn did not find actual water ice at Vesta, there are signs of hydrated minerals delivered by meteorites and dust evident in the giant asteroid's chemistry and geology.
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14 Sep 2012 |
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NASA Mars Rover Opportunity Reveals Geological Mystery
NASA's long-lived Mars rover Opportunity has returned an image of the Martian surface that is puzzling researchers. Spherical objects concentrated at an outcrop Opportunity reached last week differ in several ways from iron-rich spherules nicknamed "blueberries" the rover found at its landing site in early 2004 and at many other locations to date.
Opportunity is investigating an outcrop called Kirkwood in the Cape York segment of the western rim of Endeavour Crater. The spheres measure as much as one-eighth of an inch (3 millimeters) in diameter. The analysis is still preliminary, but it indicates that these spheres do not have the high iron content of Martian blueberries.
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28 Jun 2012 |
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Titan's Underground Ocean
Data from NASA's Cassini spacecraft have revealed Saturn's moon Titan likely harbors a layer of liquid water under its ice shell.
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