Lifeboat Foundation

A new study finds clues lurking in the Red Planet’s soil. The question of whether Mars ever supported life has captivated the imagination of scientists and the public for decades. Central to the discovery is gaining insight into the past climate of Earth’s neighbor: was the planet warm and wet, with seas and rivers much like those found on our own planet? Or was it frigid and icy, and therefore potentially less prone to supporting life as we know it? A new study finds evidence to support the latter by identifying similarities between soils found on Mars and those of Canada’s Newfoundland, a cold subarctic climate.

The study, published July 7th in Communications Earth and Environment, looked for soils on Earth with comparable materials to Mars’ Gale Crater. Scientists often use soil to depict environmental history, as the minerals present can tell the story of landscape evolution through time. Understanding more about how these materials formed could help answer long-standing questions about historical conditions on the red planet. The soils and rocks of Gale Crater provide a record of Mars’ climate between 3 and 4 billion years ago, during a time of relatively abundant water on the planet — and the same time period that saw life first appear on Earth.

“Gale Crater is a paleo lakebed — there was obviously water present. But what were the environmental conditions when the water was there?” says Anthony Feldman, a soil scientist and geomorphologist now at DRI. “We’re never going to find a direct analog to the Martian surface, because conditions are so different between Mars and Earth. But we can look at trends under terrestrial conditions and use those to try to extrapolate to Martian questions.”

Northrop Grumman’s Cygnus spacecraft is about to dock with the International Space Station on its 21st resupply mission.

Space-based solar power, an innovative concept that involves capturing solar energy in space and transmitting it to Earth, offers limitless opportunities in system design, manufacturing and deployment. This technology has the potential to revolutionize the energy industry, addressing global clean energy demands while minimizing environmental impact.

The availability of space resources, such as asteroid mining and lunar regolith utilization, presents opportunities for companies that invest in technologies and techniques to extract and process these resources, including precious metals, water and rare minerals.

The importance of continued investment in space exploration cannot be overstated. As space technology advances, businesses must consider potential applications in their industries. Collaboration between space agencies and private companies is key to driving innovation and economic growth, offering countless opportunities for the future.

A new robot bug that can live in the ocean for 100 years and feed off of bacteria has made its debut as DARPA’s latest surveillance tool.

With a vast amount of area to cover, the US government is funding research for new oceanic spy technology. Now, a Binghamton University team has developed what may become one of the most simple and effective tools in its arsenal.

Now, a new DARPA initiative is playing off of the idea of “the Internet of Things,” the term used for the many non-computer devices connected to the Internet in some way, from refrigerators to fish tanks, and seeking to develop an “Ocean of Things.” With many futurists’ eyes on space conflict and satellite warfare, it’s easy to forget that 71% of the Earth’s surface is water, and naval conflict is still an element in geopolitics.

Contrary to widespread belief, our Moon does have an atmosphere, albeit extremely thin and officially known as an “exosphere”. But what are the processes responsible for forming and maintaining this exosphere, which have eluded scientists for some time? This is what a recent study published in Science Advances hopes to address as a team of researchers investigated how a phenomenon known as “impact vaporization” from the surface being hit my objects ranging from micrometeoroids to massive meteorites during its recent and ancient history, respectively. This study holds the potential to help scientists better understand the formation and evolution of planetary bodies throughout the solar system and the processes that maintain them today.

For the study, the team analyzed 10 Apollo lunar samples (one volcanic and nine lunar regolith aka “lunar soil”) collected by astronauts over five landing sites with the goal of ascertaining how much space weathering they’ve endured over the Moon’s long history. This is because when an impact occurs, this causes the specific atoms to vaporize and kick up portions of this material into space while other portions remain trapped by lunar gravity, although now orbiting the Moon. In the end, the researchers discovered that impact vaporization is the main process responsible for the lunar exosphere over the several billion-year history of the Moon.

“We give a definitive answer that meteorite impact vaporization is the dominant process that creates the lunar atmosphere,” said Dr. Nicole Nie, who is an assistant professor in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences and lead author of the study. “The moon is close to 4.5 billion years old, and through that time the surface has been continuously bombarded by meteorites. We show that eventually, a thin atmosphere reaches a steady state because it’s being continuously replenished by small impacts all over the moon.”

Up to 60% of near-Earth objects could be dark comets, mysterious asteroids that orbit the sun in our solar system that likely contain or previously contained ice and could have been one route for delivering water to Earth, according to a University of Michigan study.

The findings suggest that asteroids in the asteroid belt, a region of the solar system roughly between Jupiter and Mars that contains much of the system’s rocky asteroids, have subsurface ice, something that has been suspected since the 1980s, according to Aster Taylor, a U-M graduate student in astronomy and lead author of the study.

The study also shows a potential pathway for delivering ice into the near-Earth solar system, according to Taylor. How Earth got its water is a longstanding question.

An experiment aimed at learning more about how plants grow in space will be aboard a National Aeronautics and Space Administration launch in early August from the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida.

While the moon lacks any breathable air, it does host a barely-there atmosphere. Since the 1980s, astronomers have observed a very thin layer of atoms bouncing over the moon’s surface. This delicate atmosphere—technically known as an “exosphere”—is likely a product of some kind of space weathering. But exactly what those processes might be has been difficult to pin down with any certainty.

The Sun’s next 11-year solar cycle has been detected in internal sound waves, even though the current Cycle 25 is at its solar maximum and won’t end until mid-2025. This peak period increases sunspots, flares, and coronal mass ejections, sending more electromagnetic energy towards Earth.

Even though the Sun is only halfway through its current 11-year solar cycle, the first rumblings of the next one have already been detected in sound waves inside our home star.

This existing cycle is now at its peak, or ‘solar maximum’ — which is when the Sun’s magnetic field flips and its poles swap places — until mid-2025.