Lifeboat Foundation

Did life ever exist on Mars, and if so, how did it get there? This is the goal of NASA’s Curiosity rover, which has traversed Gale Crater on Mars since 2012. But a recent finding by the car-sized robotic explorer could help bring scientists one step closer to answering these questions as Curiosity sent back images of yellow crystals revealed to be deposits of elemental sulfur, along with an entire field of them. This finding was accidentally “un-earthed” as Curiosity drove over them during its excursions. While scientists didn’t anticipate finding elemental sulfur in this region, this finding could hold the potential to help piece together the geologic history of Gale Crater and whether life once existed there.

Recent image of elemental sulfur crystals obtained by NASA’s Curiosity rover on Mars. (Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Malin Space Science Systems)

“Finding a field of stones made of pure sulfur is like finding an oasis in the desert,” said Dr. Ashwin Vasavada, who is a project scientist on Curiosity at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “It shouldn’t be there, so now we have to explain it. Discovering strange and unexpected things is what makes planetary exploration so exciting.”

How many Earth-like planets exist throughout the universe? This is what recent talk given at the National Astronomy Meeting 2024 hopes to address as Dr. David Brown, who is a scientist on the European Space Agency’s (ESA) PLATO (PLAnetary Transits and Oscillations of stars) mission, provided an update on the mission and the goals it hopes to achieve. This comes as PLATO is currently scheduled to launch in December 2026 with the goal of finding Earth-like planets throughout the universe, which could greatly expand our knowledge of exoplanets, as well.

“PLATO’s goal is to search for exoplanets around stars similar to the Sun and at orbital periods long enough for them to be in the habitable zone,” said Dr. Brown. “One of the main mission objectives is to find another Earth-Sun equivalent pair, but it is also designed to carefully and precisely characterize the exoplanets that it finds (i.e. work out their masses, radii, and bulk density).”

Scientists made a game-changing discovery about energy conversion in space.

Astronomers, led by Caltech’s Kareem El-Badry, have identified what could be 21 neutron stars orbiting stars similar to our sun—a rare discovery in the universe where most stars are found in pairs.

Made famous in 1995 by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope, the Pillars of Creation in the heart of the Eagle Nebula have captured imaginations worldwide with their arresting, ethereal beauty.

Now, NASA has released a new 3D visualization of these towering celestial structures using data from NASA’s Hubble and James Webb space telescopes. This is the most comprehensive and detailed multiwavelength movie yet of these star-birthing clouds.

“By flying past and amongst the pillars, viewers experience their three-dimensional structure and see how they look different in the Hubble visible-light view versus the Webb infrared-light view,” explained principal visualization scientist Frank Summers of the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, who led the movie development team for NASA’s Universe of Learning.

This plant that could survive the harsh conditions on Mars, which could help future human missions to explore and terraform the red planet.

ICYMI, Nobel Laureate Kip Thorne (BS ’62) reached across history, physics, and astronomy to highlight characters and discoveries that changed humanity’s understanding of space and time.

His talk was the 100th in Caltech Astro’s Stargazing Lecture Series.

The neutron star PSR J0437 spins hundreds of times a second and has a mass equivalent to 1.4 suns.

Based on our experiments, the ‘safe’ sampling depth for amino acids on Europa is almost 8 inches (around 20 centimeters) at high latitudes of the trailing hemisphere (hemisphere opposite to the direction of Europa’s motion around Jupiter) in the area where the surface hasn’t been disturbed much by…

How deep will future landers to Jupiter’s moon, Europa, and Saturn’s moon, Enceladus have to dig to find organic molecules aka the building blocks of life? This is what a recent study published in Astrobiology hopes to address as an international team of researchers investigated whether near-surface organic molecules on Europa and Enceladus could survive the intense solar and cosmic radiation since neither moon has a magnetic field like the Earth to shield it. This study holds the potential to help scientists better understand the conditions for finding life beyond Earth and the methods for finding that life, as well.

Image of Jupiter’s moon, Europa, obtained by NASA’s Juno spacecraft in September 2022. (Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS Image processing: Kevin M. Gill CC BY 3.0)

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