Topic: Solar Systems
Missy Elliott’s “The Rain” Gets Beamed to Venus

Missy Elliott’s “The Rain” Gets Beamed to Venus

NASA periodically transmits cultural content into space. From music to a recording of the human heartbeat on Voyager’s golden record, who we are as a planet spanning civilization periodically gets beamed to the stars. And the variety of what is getting sent out just got a bit more hip to the beat.  For reasons I can’t explain, NASA pointed its Deep Space Network at the planet Venus and transmitted the Lyrics to Missy Elliott’s song “The Rain”. Venus, by the way, is Missy Elliott’s favorite planet. Because of how radio beams spread out as they travel, some of this signal will have...

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Lucy finds a moonmoon

Lucy finds a moonmoon

Credit: NASA/Goddard/SwRI/Johns Hopkins APL Last episode, we brought you some early science results from the Lucy mission, which is out exploring asteroids in the main belt on the way to hanging out amongst Jupiter’s Trojan asteroids. The biggest piece of news was the...

Lucy Sends Science Home

Lucy Sends Science Home

Credit: NASA Back in October 2021, a mission called Lucy lifted off on a multi-year journey to visit Jupiter’s two collections of Trojan Asteroids. Today, it is making its way through the asteroid belt before circling back to use the Earth to get a gravitational...

(Big-)Moonless worlds have unstable tilts

(Big-)Moonless worlds have unstable tilts

Modern-day Mars experiences cyclical changes in climate and, consequently, ice distribution. Unlike Earth, the obliquity (or tilt) of Mars changes substantially on timescales of hundreds of thousands to millions of years. At present day obliquity of about 25-degree...

Perseverance collects a River of Science

Perseverance collects a River of Science

Jezero Crater as Seen by ESA's Mars Express Orbiter: This image shows the remains of an ancient delta in Mars' Jezero Crater, which NASA's Perseverance Mars rover will explore for signs of fossilized microbial life. Credit: NASA The remnants of ancient dunes aren’t...

How Rivers Flow: Here, Mars & Titan

How Rivers Flow: Here, Mars & Titan

This false-color image shows Titan’s second-largest body of liquid, Ligeia Mare, in the moon’s northern hemisphere. Scientists think that rivers flowing into large bodies of liquids like this one should form deltas. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASI/Cornell New research...