Three billion years ago, Earth was a very different place.
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MISSIONS - Prebiotic Laboratory
Titan is the only moon in our solar system with an atmosphere, and it is the organic chemistry that has been detected in that atmosphere that has sparked the imagination of planetary scientists like Lunine. In January 2005, the European Space Agency’s (ESA’s) Huygens Probe will descend through Titan’s atmosphere, sending back a detailed picture of the chemical interactions taking place there and, hopefully, giving scientists a glimpse into the chemistry that took place on Earth before life took hold. Huygens is part of the Cassini-Huygens mission to explore Saturn and its rings and moons. Lunine is the only ...
August 11, 2004 • Posted by: Yael Kovo • Report issue
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MISSIONS - Saturn's Moon Titan: Planet Wannabe
In January 2005, the European Space Agency’s (ESA’s) Huygens Probe will descend through Titan’s atmosphere, sending back a detailed picture of the chemical interactions taking place there and, hopefully, giving scientists a glimpse into the chemistry that took place on early, prebiotic Earth. The Huygens Probe is part of the Cassini-Huygens mission to explore Saturn and its rings and moons. Titan is the only moon in our solar system with an atmosphere. Organic chemistry detected in that atmosphere has sparked the imagination of planetary scientists like Lunine. Lunine is the only U.S. scientist selected by the ESA to ...
August 09, 2004 • Posted by: Yael Kovo • Report issue
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Rocks Tell Stories in Reports of Spirit's First 90 Martian Days
Scientific findings from the NASA rover Spirit’s first three months on Mars will be published Friday, marking the start of a flood of peer-reviewed discoveries in scientific journals from the continuing two-rover adventure.
August 05, 2004 • Posted by: Shige Abe • Report issue
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MISSIONS - Titan's Strange Surface
New images and spectroscopic data of the surface of Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, have puzzled NASA scientists.
Cassini spacecraft instruments have peered through the orange smog of Titan and glimpsed the surface below. Images sent back to Earth reveal dark areas and lighter, fuzzy areas. Data from the Visual Infrared Mapping Spectrometer (VIMS) indicate that the dark areas are pure water ice. The bright fuzzy regions have several different types of non-ice materials, and may include organic materials such as hydrocarbons.
Dark and light surface regions had been seen by other telescopes, including the Hubble Space Telescope, but the VIMS ...
July 03, 2004 • Posted by: Yael Kovo • Report issue
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MISSIONS - Cassini Detects Oxygen Buildup in Saturn's E Ring
A massive oxygen buildup was seen by Cassini’s Ultraviolet Imaging Spectrograph (UVIS) instrument earlier this year, while the spacecraft was en route to Saturn, mission scientists said Friday. Saturn’s rings are composed, for the most part, of pure water ice, good ol’ H 2 O. As this icy material is bombarded by charged particles from Saturn’s magnetosphere, it breaks down into its constituents, hydrogen and oxygen. So there is always some oxygen floating around in the ring system. But what UVIS detected in Saturn’s E ring wasn’t just “some” oxygen; it was a tremendous burst of the stuff, that seemed ...
July 03, 2004 • Posted by: Yael Kovo • Report issue
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MISSIONS - Weather May Disrupt Cassini Signals
“Everything still appears to be right on track.” That was the word from Robert Mitchell, Cassini program manager, as he addressed reporters Wednesday morning at a briefing at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California. Cassini, a $3 billion international mission to explore Saturn and its rings and moons, is scheduled to arrive at the ringed planet tonight. But Mitchell offered a caveat. Things are on track at the Saturn end of things, he said. Back on Earth, however, predicted high winds threaten to force engineers to stow a massive dish-shaped antenna at Canberra, Australia, to protect it ...
June 30, 2004 • Posted by: Yael Kovo • Report issue
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MISSIONS - Cassini Closes in on Saturn
After a seven-year journey through interplanetary space, Cassini-Huygens is about to reach its destination. Wednesday night (early Thursday morning in Europe) the $3 billion spacecraft will arrive at Saturn; and if a 96-minute engine burn comes off as planned, become the first artificial satellite ever to go into orbit around the ringed planet.
Cassini mission planners say that everything looks good for Saturn orbital insertion (SOI), the engine burn that will slow the spacecraft down enough to allow it to be captured by Saturn’s gravitational field. Mission engineers have verified that Cassini’s systems are working as expected; they have double-checked ...
June 29, 2004 • Posted by: Yael Kovo • Report issue
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Raw Ingredients for Life Detected in Planetary Construction Zones
NASA has announced new findings from the Spitzer Space Telescope, including icy dust particles coated with water, methanol and carbon dioxide, which may help explain the origin of icy planetoids like comets.
May 27, 2004 • Posted by: Shige Abe • Report issue
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Faking Titan in the Lab
Researchers from the University of Arizona have recreated some of the chemicals thought to be in the atmosphere of Titan, Saturn’s largest moon.
May 18, 2004 • Posted by: Shige Abe • Report issue
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Did an Impact Trigger the Permian-Triassic Extinction?
Identification of the cause of this critical event for the history of life is an important challenge for paleontologists and astrobiologists. As Michael Benton recently wrote (Michael J. Benton: When Life Nearly Died – The Greatest Mass Extinction of All Time, Thames & Hudson, 2003):
“The end-Permian mass extinction may be less well known than the end-Cretaceous, but it was by far the biggest mass extinction of all time. Perhaps as few as 10 percent of species survived the end of the Permian, whereas 50 percent survived the end of the Cretaceous. Fifty percent extinction was associated with devastating environmental upheaval ...
May 17, 2004 • Posted by: Shige Abe • Report issue
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Second Opportunity
NASA’s Opportunity rover is about to embark on a second journey of exploration. Opportunity spent the past several days taking in the view from the rim of Endurance Crater. The first full-color panorama of the crater, released by NASA late last week, reveals large bedrock outcrops that mission scientists are anxious to study.
Initial Pancam images and spectral analysis performed by the rover’s Mini-TES instrument indicate that the Endurance Crater outcrops are not composed of the same sulfate-rich material found in Eagle Crater. Steve Squyres, principal investigator for the Mars Exploration Rover (MER) mission, said the new outcrop ...
May 04, 2004 • Posted by: Yael Kovo • Report issue
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Methane on Mars: A Possible Biomarker?
Three research teams have recently reported detecting the gas methane in the martian atmosphere, at the low concentration of about 10 parts per billion. Most methane (CH4) on Earth is produced in biological processes, both contemporary production by microbes and as underground natural gas formed by earlier generations of microbial life. Since methane is relatively short-lived once it is released into the oxidizing atmospheres of either Earth or Mars, its presence has long been considered a biomarker – a chemical that signals the presence of biological processes. Is the methane discovered on Mars evidence for contemporary life on the Red Planet ...
April 07, 2004 • Posted by: Shige Abe • Report issue
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NASA Research Focuses on Yellowstone's Hot Springs and Compares Findings to Rocks From Mars
Bozeman, Montana: How does life begin and evolve? Is there life elsewhere in the Universe? What is the future of life on Earth? These fundamental questions make up the science of astrobiology, and some of NASA’s top scientists are trying to answer them in – of all places – Yellowstone National Park. Microscopic organisms that have inhabited Yellowstone’s hot springs for billions of years tell the story of life on earth, and could eventually lead to the discovery of life on other planets.
While astrobiology-related studies have been taking place in Yellowstone for several years, a grant from Lockheed ...
March 26, 2004 • Posted by: Shige Abe • Report issue
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Iron Blueberries
The story of water on ancient Mars just got more interesting. Scientists working on the Mars Exploration Rover (MER) mission announced last week that the small spherules of rock, referred to as “blueberries,” embedded in the bedrock outcrop near the Opportunity landing site contain the iron oxide hematite.
Scientists previously announced that the rock matrix that makes up the bulk of the outcrop contained a high concentration of sulfate minerals – a clear indication, they said, that the rock was once saturated with water. Embedded within this rock matrix, and scattered across the floor of the crater, are tiny ...
March 24, 2004 • Posted by: Yael Kovo • Report issue
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Opportunity Finds Beachfront Property on Mars
The rocks in the outcrop that NASA’s Opportunity rover has been exploring for the past several weeks “were not just altered and modified by water; they were actually formed in water, perhaps [in] a shallow salty sea,” NASA Associate Administrator Ed Weiler said Tuesday.
Three weeks ago, NASA scientists announced that they had uncovered mineral evidence that water had percolated underground through Opportunity Ledge, altering its chemical composition. Opportunity Ledge is the bedrock outcrop in Eagle Crater, where the rover landed. Last week, the mission science team reported that the tiny gray spherules embedded in the rock were ...
March 23, 2004 • Posted by: Yael Kovo • Report issue