Planetary Science

Recent Articles

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  The Moon is Covered in Tiny Orange Glass Beads. Now We Know Why.

  By Mark Thompson - June 12, 2025

  When the Apollo astronauts landed on the Moon, they discovered drifts of tiny brilliant orange glass beads glittering across the surface. Each one less than 1 mm across and formed about 3.6 billion years ago. These microscopic treasures, each smaller than a pinhead, had been hiding their secrets for billions of years. Now, cutting edge technology has finally cracked the mystery: they're perfect time capsules from the Moon's explosive volcanic past, frozen droplets of ancient lava that solidified instantly in the airless void recording the history of the Moon.

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  Supernova Explosions Changed Earth's Climate and Shaped Humanity's History

  By Evan Gough - June 12, 2025

  Most scientists agree that supernova explosions have affected Earth's climate, though the details are not all clear. They likely cooled the climate several times in the last several thousand years, just as humanity was becoming established around the world. The evidence is in telescopes and tree rings.

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  Martian Supervolcano Peeks Through the Cloudtops

  By Matthew Williams - June 10, 2025

  NASA's 2001 Mars Odyssey orbiter captured this incredible image of the giant shield volcano Arsia Mons, poking through the cloud tops at Martian dawn. Arsia and the other megavolcanoes on Mars are so tall they're often surrounded by water ice clouds in the early morning. Odyssey is normally staring straight down, so to capture this unique angle, it had to rotate 90 degrees while in orbit so that it could capture a side perspective view of the volcano.

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  NASA's Top 5 Technical Challenges Countdown: #1: Survive the Lunar Night

  By Paul Sutter - June 10, 2025

  Now I know this sounds like a low-budget knockoff of Five Nights at Freddy's, but it's the real deal

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  The Martian Atmosphere is Sputtering

  By Matthew Williams - June 10, 2025

  The Earth's atmosphere is protected by a magnetosphere, but Mars lacks this protective shield and lost its atmosphere to space long ago through interactions with the solar wind. In a new paper, scientists report that they have directly observed this process of "atmospheric sputtering," watching how incoming ions from the solar wind directly cause neutral atmospheric particles to escape. They found the process is stronger than anticipated, especially in solar storms.

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  Webb Watches Haze Rise and Fall in Pluto's Atmosphere

  By Carolyn Collins Petersen - June 04, 2025

  When the New Horizons spacecraft swept past Pluto and Charon in 2015, it revealed two amazingly complex worlds and an active atmosphere on Pluto. Those snapshots redefined our understanding of the system. Now, new observations using the James Webb Space Telescope taken over the space of a week, show that Pluto's atmosphere is completely different from any other one in the Solar System.

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  The Next Moon Landing Will Be in High-Definition

  By Evan Gough - May 30, 2025

  The grainy videos from the Apollo Moon landings are treasured historical artifacts. For many of us, that footage will be lodged in our minds until our final synaptic spark sputters out. But like all technology since the space race days, video technology has advanced enormously, and the next Moon landings will be captured in high-definition video. The ESA is so focused on getting it right that they're practicing filming lunar landings in a special studio that mimics the conditions on the lunar surface.

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  June's Full Moon is the Southernmost for a Generation

  By David Dickinson - May 30, 2025

  Not all Full Moons are created the same. Follow the familiar Moon long enough, and you'll notice something strange, as it seems to wander across the sky from north to south, from one cycle to the next. Welcome to the fantastic precession of our natural satellite the Moon. Last December, we saw the 'Long Night's Full Moon,' as the Full Moon nearest to the solstice rode the highest in the sky for the last two decades. Now, its time for the southern hemisphere to get a turn, as the Moon heads steeply southward, on its way to Full on June 11th.

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  Webb Reveals that Europa's Surface is Constantly Changing

  By Carolyn Collins Petersen - May 29, 2025

  You'd think that icy worlds are frozen in time and space because they're - well - icy. However, planetary scientists know that all worlds can and do change, no matter how long it takes. That's true for Europa, one of Jupiter's four largest moons. Recent observations made by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) zero in on the Europan surface ices and show they're constantly changing.

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  Martian Probe Rolls Over to See Subsurface Ice and Rock

  By Mark Thompson - May 29, 2025

  NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter is equipped with a powerful tool called SHARAD (Shallow Radar), designed to peer beneath the Martian surface and uncover hidden layers of ice, rock, and geological secrets. To accommodate it, engineers mounted SHARAD on the side of the spacecraft, requiring the orbiter to roll 28° during operation to boost signal quality. But computer models hinted at something else: if the orbiter rolled more than 120°, the radar performance could dramatically improve. Scientists put this daring idea to the test—and it paid off. The extreme roll manoeuvre worked, unlocking an even clearer view of Mars's buried past.

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  The Challenge Of Coordinating Multiple Robots On The Moon

  By Andy Tomaswick - May 29, 2025

  Frameworks are a critical, if underappreciated, component of any space exploration mission. They can range from the overall mission architecture, capturing scientific and technical goals, to the structure of messages sent between two internal components of the system. One of the most interesting frameworks that is getting much attention in the space exploration community is the interaction of multiple robots for a single purpose, known as a multiple-robot system, or MRS. On top of that, one of the most common frameworks for robots on Earth or in space is the open-source Robot Operating System (ROS), which is commonly used to run everything from vacuum cleaners to giant mining trucks. Its most recent iteration, ROS2, even uses yet another framework, known as a middleware, to handle aspects of robot communication such as networking and packetizing data. However, there are plenty of different middlewares to choose from for ROS2, so a team of researchers from the University of Luxembourg decided to try to pick one that would be best for planetary exploration applications.

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  Did a Large Impact on the Moon Make its Rocks Magnetic?

  By Evan Gough - May 29, 2025

  We've been gazing at the Moon for a long time, yet it's still mysterious. We've sent numerous orbiters and landers to our satellite, and even brought some of it back to our labs. Those rocks only presented more mysteries, in some ways. Lunar rocks are magnetic, yet the Moon doesn't have a magnetosphere. How did this happen?

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  Will Europa Become a New Habitable World When the Sun Becomes a Red Giant?

  By Carolyn Collins Petersen - May 27, 2025

  People always want to know what will happen to Earth when the Sun eventually swells up as a red giant. For one thing, the expanding Sun will turn the inner planets into cinders. It will almost certainly spell the end of life on our planet. Mars might become more temperate and hospitable to life. In addition, it could well be a boon for the gas giant Jupiter and its moons. That's because the habitable zone of the Solar System will move outward from where it is now, to a spot encompassing the Jovian system and forcing changes on all of those worlds.

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  Demonstrating Lunar Surface Raman Spectroscopy with the Raman Cube Rover

  By Laurence Tognetti, MSc - May 27, 2025

  Raman spectroscopy uses scattered to identify a substance's chemical ingredients and is one of the most widely used scientific methods in space exploration. It is used for lunar exploration to identify volcanic minerals, water ice, and space weathering, and has been limited to obtaining data from lunar orbiters. But how can Raman spectroscopy be conducted on the lunar surface to help us better understand our nearest celestial neighbor? This is what a recent study presented at the 56th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference hopes to address as a team of NASA and academic researchers discussed the Raman Cube Rover (R3R), which would be delivered to the lunar surface via the private space company, Astrobotic.

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  How Likely Are Habitable Exo-Moons?

  By Evan Gough - May 26, 2025

  Of the roughly 6,000 exoplanets we've discovered, a significant number are in the apparent habitable zones of their stars. Most are giant planets; either gas giants like Jupiter and Saturn, or ice giants like Uranus and Neptune. Could some of those have habitable exomoons?

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  Astronomers Conduct a Preliminary Search for Exoplanets Around Alpha Centauri

  By Matthew Williams - May 23, 2025

  An international team of researchers has announced the preliminary findings of Webb's observations of the Alpha Centauri system. According to their analysis, Webb could detect a Jupiter-sized planet and a very bright zodiacal dust disk around Alpha Cen A. More information will be released soon!

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  Is Venus Hiding Dangerous Asteroids?

  By Evan Gough - May 23, 2025

  Twenty years ago, the US Congress instructed NASA to find 90% of near-Earth asteroids threatening Earth. They've made progress finding these asteroids that orbit the Sun and come to within 1.3 astronomical units of Earth. However, they may have to expand their search since astronomers are now finding asteroids co-orbiting Venus that could pose a threat.

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  Venus Has a Single Solid Crust... But It's Surprisingly Thin

  By David Dickinson - May 23, 2025

  Our nearest neighbor is only slightly smaller than the Earth… but that's just about the only thing the two planets have in common. Now, a recent NASA-funded study suggests that the interior of Venus may be equally strange as well.

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  Our Solar System May Have a New Planetary Sibling: Another Dwarf Planet

  By Evan Gough - May 22, 2025

  Our understanding of our Solar System is still evolving. As our telescopes have improved, they've brought the Solar System's deeper reaches into view. Pluto was disqualified as a planet because of it. Now, new research says another dwarf planet may reside at the edge of the Solar System. Its presence supports the Planet X hypothesis.

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  New Study Suggests that Jupiter was Once Twice as Big as it is Today

  By Matthew Williams - May 20, 2025

  Jupiter and its powerful gravity have played a major role in sculpting the Solar System. A new study provides a glimpse into Jupiter's primordial state, which could have implications for our understanding of how the Solar System evolved.