Tag Archives: earth

NASA’s Perseverance rover has been playing second fiddle to the Ingenuity helicopter in recent months. But in fairness, it’s a helicopter on Mars. Not to be outdone, Perseverance is gearing up for the next big step in its mission on the red planet. In the coming weeks, NASA will harvest …

Earth has numerous properties that make it an ideal home for life as we know it, including a robust magnetic field that deflects radiation, a temperate climate with liquid water, a large moon that stabilizes the planet’s rotation, and a modest axial tilt. That last item may be more important …

Viruses may be the missing piece of the puzzle that could help explain how soft microbial mats transition into hard stromatolites that are prevalent in such places as Shark Bay and the Pilbara in Australia. Stromatolites at Shark Bay, Western Australia. Image credit: Paul Harrison / CC BY-SA 3.0. Stromatolites …

Hurricanes in the Earth’s low atmosphere are well known; however, disturbances resembling hurricanes had never before been detected in the upper atmosphere. An artist’s impression of a space hurricane. Image credit: Qing-He Zhang, Shandong University. “Until now, it was uncertain that space plasma hurricanes even existed, so to prove this …

Solar Orbiter, a collaborative mission between ESA and NASA to study the Sun, has captured a series of images showing three solar system planets: Venus, Earth, and Mars. This image was captured on November 18, 2020, by the SoloHI camera on board Solar Orbiter. Venus (left), Earth (middle), and Mars …

  Astronomers have identified more than 4,000 exoplanets orbiting other stars but just a few “rogue planets” wandering the galaxy without a star to call home. A new study claims to have spotted one of these worlds, and it may be a small, rocky world like Earth. If confirmed, the …

  Earth has been bombarded by space rocks throughout its history, but we’re lucky no large ones have slammed into the planet lately. Astronomers keep a careful watch on the skies, hoping to spot potential impactors far enough in advance that we can do something about it, and one of …

On October 20, 2020, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx (Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security, Regolith Explorer) spacecraft briefly touched an asteroid to collect regolith (rocks and dust) from the surface of the near-Earth asteroid (101955) Bennu. All spacecraft telemetry data indicates the sample collection event, known as ‘Touch-And-Go’ (TAG), executed as expected. …

Solar storms strip a planet’s atmosphere over time, and only a strong magnetosphere would be able to provide maximum protection. Lunar samples gathered by NASA’s Apollo missions recently revealed that the Moon had its own global magnetosphere, lasting from about 4.25 to 2.5 billion years ago. According to new research, …

NASA’s OSIRIS-REx (Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security, Regolith Explorer) mission to the near-Earth asteroid Bennu is designed to return a carbon-rich sample of the asteroid to Earth. This 500-m-diameter body was chosen as the mission target due to its spectral similarity to primitive and organic-rich carbonaceous chondrite meteorites. In …