Collapsed volcanoes form large, dark spots on Io's surface, NASA/JPL/USGS One of our greatest frustrations as a science, is we astronomical and planetary scientists can’t do the same kind of experiments that other kinds of scientists get to do. We look at things from millions of miles to billions of light years away and try and understand their inner workings while only being able to see their surface. While astronomers really can’t do anything to improve our situation, our planetary science siblings do get periodic opportunities to fling spacecraft around distant worlds and use gravity to...
Titan’s Lakes May Have Shoreline Erosion
Image Credit: Cassini Mission Here on Earth we often talk about planetary analogues. These are areas where the landscape here on our planet is geological similar to other worlds. There are regions in the Atacama desert, for instance, that are very similar to Mars. ...
Lava Lakes on Io Images in Infrared
I don’t think there is an astronomer who doesn’t love a pretty high resolution image of …well… pretty much anything in space. Give me a crisp clear galaxy, or a nebula, or even a quiet frost field on another planet and I will happily stare at the pretty picture. But...
Jupiter’s Not-enduring Red Spot
Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/Gerald Eichstadt/Justin Cowart It turns out, Jupiter likes to have giant red spots, but it doesn’t always have the same giant red spot. New research led by Agustin Sanchez-Lavega and appearing in Geophysical Research letters...
Vibrant Auroras shine on Mars
The purple color in this video shows auroras on Mars’ nightside as detected by the ultraviolet instrument aboard NASA’s MAVEN orbiter between May 14 and 20, 2024. The brighter the purple, the more auroras that were present. Credit: NASA/University of...
Mars Rover Finds Way To Ford Ancient River
a map of Percy's path The Perseverance rover has been making its way along the coast line of a long dried up river that once allowed water to drain from Jezero Crater. Today, the Neretva Vallis river channel isn’t just dry, it’s filled with sand dunes… And Sand Dunes...
Calculating Pluto’s Oceans
While amazing data is the start of amazing research, it takes a lot of calculations and models to truly understand what the data mean. Nine years after the New Horizons mission flew past Pluto and discovered it has mountains of ice, and a strangely cracked landscape,...
Lucy’s Discovered Dinkinesh Throws Rocks
We often find ourselves saying that science moves at that rate of technology. With new telescopes and spacecraft we can get new views on the universe. And some of them are weirdly unexpected. Back in November 2023, the Lucy mission flew past the asteroid Dinkinesh on...
Mars was a badly made Earth 2
How a wet Mars may have appeared based on MOLA data. Credit: Ittiz When we look out across the Universe, or even just our Solar System, we are only seeing a moment in the fast history of space. We see a galaxy fully formed with spiral arms and a nice little bar. We...
Some planets had rough childhoods before getting kicked out
Jupiter-Mass Binary Objects. Credit NASA/ESA/CSA/McCaughrean & Person One of the new weird things planetary science has to explain is the preponderance of free floating planets that JWST has discovered. In October 2023, Samuel Pearson & Mark McCaughrean posted...
JWST measures alien weather
Temperature map of WASP-43b provided by NASA's JWST One of JWST’s raison detres is studying the atmospheres of exoplanets - alien worlds orbiting far off stars. In a new paper in Nature Astronomy, we get spectacular evidence that JWST will achieve its goals. The...